Synthetic Rally

Como actividad de colaboración con otros equipos iGEM, el equipo iGEMUANL fue invitado por el equipo iGEM CIDEB a llevar a cabo la actividad llamada “Rally Sintético”. Que consistió en difundir la Biología Sintética, demostrar Biología Molecular y mostrar la Ingeniería Genética a los estudiantes de la secundaria del Colegio Americano Anáhuac por medio de actividades recreativas. Primeramente se llevaron exposiciones introductorias y posteriormente se llevó a cabo la actividad de una duración aproximada de 2 horas. Finalmente se realizó una simulación de concurso iGEM donde aplicaron los conocimientos adquiridos para lograr alcanzar el Gran Premio, el Gran BioBrick.

Description

Objectives

1. To promote the importance and impact synthetic biology has actually, and inform about the interesting applications through a funny, entertaining, educative and original activity: the “Synthetic rally”. This would help the students learn and enjoy the experience of synthetic biology in a very “silence” way playing thematic games which helped them understand really easy some difficult concepts such as “DNA”, “Plasmids”, “BioBrick”, etc.
2. The purpose of the final activity is to simulate an iGEM competition, in which they would apply their knowledge to build an original circuit and win the “Great BioBrick”.
3. To generate in 200 junior high students a “good feeling” about synthetic biology. Show them the applications, benefits, risks, and how they could improve the world by modifying something to make a better place, since medicines to advances for protecting the environment.

Activities:

In order to explain completely what iGEM and synthetic biology several activities were done:

1. First a small introduction about synthetic biology was given to the students in groups of 2. This was distributed among the students by 2 iGEMers per group. After our iGEM-UANL collaborators gave a brief introduction of what synthetic biology is, some definitions, origins and what does it imply. Then CIDEB iGEMers explained the whole activity and the objective of the activity. This was to create in the students’ mind preparation for what they´d learn.
2. Before go out to the rally, for every student to participate and understand the team-collaboration experience, they were arranged in teams of 10 students. They were a total of 200 junior high students. This is an important part of the activity as iGEM is about team work, so they had to be very united and try to understand each other to achieve something, just as iGEM-CIDE, iGEM-UANL and now the rally´s teams.
3. The thematic rally was done introducing different concepts and knowledge in every station. This was done in the playground of the school “Colegio Americano Anáhuac”. The participants were junior high students from 7th, 8th and 9th grade. They formed 20 teams of 10 integers each team. For all the teams to experience every stop they followed different roles. For example, in the stop #1 2 teams started, team 1 and team 2. When the time was over they took different paths. Team 1 followed to the right and team 2 followed to the left. This allowed them to go in a circular way until completing every station and against different teams. The logistic was applied to every team in the really.
4. This rally was about 10 different stations, each with a different game according to the topic we wanted the students to learn. There were 2 persons in each station, one from iGEM-UANL and one from iGEM-CIDEB. This was the arrangement for a better dynamic explaining the concept of the game and the game itself.
5. Once the rally was over, they built a circuit using the BioBricks they won in every station. They had to be very creative in order to apply them to the real life and win the final price.
6. This activity concluded with a very little award ceremony where we thanked them for their very big effort, attention and dedication to the activity and gave the “Golden BioBrick” to the winner. We said out loud all the circuits for the whole school to listen the different ideas and applications this may have.
7. Finally a second poll was applied to compare it with the first one. This is a very good marker to evaluate our advance in the students´ knowledge and comprehension about synthetic biology.

General Topics of the Rally

Synthetic Rally STOPS