Human Practice
Admittedly, synthetic biology is a young discipline. The participation of the youth can bring different validity to this field of study. In 2011, iGEM brought High School Division into being. There is no denying that the intersection of high school students and synthetic biology will lead to gender new spark!
Tsinghua-A 2012 had a deep communication with high school students who are interested in synthetic biology, whilst we offered what we can to help participants for iGEM HS in China.
ITCCC(International Teenager Competition and Communication Center)is a Chinese organization committed to promoting science and technology competitions for youth. With their help, on Aug 17th, we had a heated communication with many high school students in Beijing. We talked about lots of things, such as the basic information and concepts of synthetic biology, the status of iGEM, some interesting ideas in synthetic biology and so on. They showed great enthusiasm in synthetic biology and iGEM.
At the same time, Mao Yong, the vice director of ITCCC, who is preparing to organize iGEM HS, had several communications with us on aspects such as the foundation of lab, the characteristics of high school students when they get in touch with scientific researches and so on. We offered the experience of our attending in iGEM to them, whilst we had discussions about the way of undergraduate iGEMers’ participation in middle school as mentors. We hope that with our help and cooperation, there is a better future for iGEM HS in China.
http://itccc.org.cn/index.html
http://itccc.org.cn/igem.html
There are three teams for iGEM 2012 in Tsinghua University: Tsinghua, Tsinghua-A and Tsinghua-D. Every team has its merits. Although independent from each other, we three have wide-range collaborations. On Sept 21st, 2012, with the management and administration of the Association of Science and Technology, School of Life Sciences, we held a lecture on synthetic biology for students from various departments. According to our engineering background, we Tsinghua-A introduced the engineering characters of synthetic biology and our unique experiences for attending iGEM.