Team:TMU-Tokyo/HumanPractice

■Lecture at secondary school

On July 11, 2012, our team made a lecture at the career guidance to the 9th graders of Minamitama Metropolitan Secondary School. We described our project and activities of iGEM in the lecture and caught many interests about synthetic biology and iGEM from the future researchers.

In the one-hour lecture, we talked broadly about of our campus life and then focused on iGEM as an activity example. However, the students had no basic knowledge of synthetic biology. Therefore, began with catchy topics, used easy words besides technical terms and used more figures and illustrations besides long explanations to make the whole lecture more understandable. The reactions of the students were good. They paid good attention to our lecture and some were taking notes. The fact that iGEM is an international competition seemed to attracted their ambition.

Through this short time, we believe that we were able to make notice the 9th graders that there is a science field called “synthetic biology” and that there is an international competition for synthetic biology students. We gained many attention and interests of the becoming scientists to this field and iGEM.