Difference between revisions of "Team:Heidelberg/Education"

Tobias´ Internship at the iGEM lab

The High School Research Lab Ortenau is a place for young scientists to get in touch with biological research and to gain wet-lab experience. We decided to closely collaborate with the High School Research lab during the 2017 iGEM season. The Research Lab Ortenau aims at arousing the student’s interest for biology. Mentoring the High School students meant great responsibility for us, and provided the opportunity to be involved even more in the synthetic biology community. We even intensified the collaboration, when Tobias Stadelmann, a high school student from the Research Lab Ortenau, asked whether it would be possible to work in our iGEM lab for a two-week internship. In the High School Research Lab Tobias is working on a project based on DNAzmes. During the time in our iGEM lab, Tobias was involved in our experiments to simplify PACE and to establish PREDCEL for directed evolution approaches. We are sure that all of us, Tobias, the High School Research Lab Ortenau, and the iGEM team gained profit from this collaboration. We are confident, that Tobias can apply the newly learned techniques to his DNazymes project and that he can transfer the know-how to other projects in the High School Research Lab Ortenau.

Course on Responsible Genetic Engineering in our Lab

Arousing the interest of High School students for science is a major aim we pursued during our education activites. Besides the iGEM Seminar we gave at a local high school we received a request from a high school from Berlin. They were highly interested in visiting our lab for gaining some practical experience and getting insights into the research on directed evolution we perform in our lab. We hosted this high school class for a course on responsible genetic engineering in our lab. First we gave a short lecture on evolution, gene technology and introduced the theoretical background of our project to the class. We asked them to fill in our Survey for High School Students and they answered our questions with great passion. After they have gained enough theoretical knowledge about the experiments we perform in our lab, the attended a safety instruction held by our PI Dominik Niopek. They learned how to behave in a risk group 1 laboratory like our iGEM lab, for example that everyone needs to wear a lab coat and gloves, that food and drinks are forbidden as well as more general safety and hygiene measures like how to wash one´s hands.
The feedback we received was althrough positive and they left our iGEM lab with new experiences and a general impression on about every day live of scientists in the field of Synthetic Biology.

Click on the grey areas to scroll through our pictures!

Educating Responsible Future Scientits
Educating high school students also comprises stimulating them to being reflective, responsible and communicating their personal opinions. Therefore, we created a survey for high school students that serves as a starting point for the aforementioned points. Here you find the results of our questionnaire filled in during the responsible genetic engineering course in our lab.

Click on the grey areas to scroll through our survey!

iGEM Seminar at a local High School

The overall impressions we gained at the TEDx event was that the public community is highly interested in synthetic biology, but only very few people have a precise idea of what synthetic biology really means and how this research field is influencing their daily life.

“I believe that children are the future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.” (Whitney Houston)

As we share this opinion, we decided to start our educational work by arousing interest among the young generation – people, who shape the future. We visited a class of 10^th grade students of the Johann-Sebastian-Bach high school in Mannheim. The aim of our visit was to spread fascination for natural sciences in general and to inform the students about synthetic biology, as well as getting an impression of their perspectives towards our project. Our interactive presentation outlined the establishment of synthetic biology and gave interesting and amusing examples of former iGEM projects to point out the great possibilities this field offers. Subsequently, we taught them the main principles of evolution: variability and selection, and how specific characteristics are encoded in the DNA. So, we could later explain our own project in an easy and understandable way. To acquire a better understanding of the quite abstract world of molecular biology, we performed a DNA extraction with the students to connect their observations to their knowledge about the handbook of life – the DNA. They were fascinated by seeing the precipitated DNA of a strawberry, and asked several times if this is really DNA. The students were very enthusiastic and motivated to honestly answer our questionnaire about the critical aspects of the areas we address with our specific project including directed evolution and artificial intelligence. All in all, the school visit was a great success for both sites. We were delighted about the very positive feedback we got in our questionnaire and we were able make use of some of their answers. For instance, we integrated their responses on “How scientists can involve society in their research?” in our Human Practices project.

Click on the grey areas to scroll through our pictures!

Educating Responsible Future Scientits
Educating high school students also comprises stimulating them to being reflective, responsible and communicating their personal opinions. Therefore, we created a survey for high school students that serves as a starting point for the aforementioned points. Here you find the results of our questionnaire filled in during our iGEM seminar at a local high school.

Click on the grey areas to scroll through our survey!

Explanatory and Educative Video about our Project

Communicating science in a simple and easy understandable way is quite important, as we learned during our Human Practice activity. Here you can watch the video we created to make our project accessible to everyone and even non-scientists can get an impression on the research we performed during the this year´s iGEM season.