Team:WashU StLouis/Engagement
Public Engagement, Education, and Outreach
Pre-Engineering Institute BioBuilder Activity
Throughout the Summer, the Washington University in St. Louis School of Engineering and Applied Science hosts a Pre-Engineering Institute for high school students to experience the various disciplines of engineering. The program holds two sessions, and we led a 3.5 hour afternoon workshop on synthetic biology for each of those sessions. During each workshop we presented on the field of synthetic biology and taught them about the central dogma pathway of biology. Following these presentations, we led the students in lab sessions, involving the tuning the expression of Beta-galactosidase in E. coli. Throughout this session, we taught them how to use basic wet lab equipment and answered their questions about the lab, synthetic biology, and college in general.
BioBuilder Professional Development Workshop at Monsanto
On July 20th, we went to Monsanto's Chesterfield campus to speak to local high school teachers and administrators about our involvement in iGEM and what we love about the program. We also presented on our project to give them an example of an iGEM project and synthetic biology research. The high school teachers were interested in starting iGEM teams at their own high schools and wanted to learn more how our team operates.
