Team:NTNU Trondheim/Outreach

From 2012.igem.org

Outreach

Our project also has an outreach part. Our main outreach project will be to participate in researchers' night, which is an event for high school students and students from non-degree granting colleges. The goal of researchers' night is to show the students that research is fun, to inspire them, and to motivate them to take higher education. As a second outreach project, the team will be writing a chapter on different assembly techniques in a textbook. We also concider our matchmaker part of our outreach effort. More info about Researchers' night, our textbook chapter, and the matchmaker is given below.

Researcher's Night

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This year, the NTNU iGEM team is participating in Researchers' Night, which is an arrangement for high school students. This is the eighth year Researchers' night is being arranged, and it has traditionally been very popular at NTNU. The pictures above are all taken during Researchers' night 2011 (by Kristina Jones, NTNU). Last year, over 1200 students visited the arrangement. This year, Researchers' night will be arranged the 28th of september, and we have been inveted to participate. We are really looking forward to it, since this is a unique opportunity to tell students about the possibilities of synthetic biology, and motivate them for a career in biotechnology. It seems that the students are looking forward to it as well, since this year's arrangement was fully booked in 4 minutes! This year, the 1100 participating students can visit 31 different stands, one of them being ours. To get the students to understand the concept of giving organisms new characteristic properties by putting together biobricks, we have made a biobrick construction kit, including both DNA and restriction enzymes (a picture of the DNA from the construction kit is given below). We hope that this construction kit will make it easier both to understand why we are able to put together biobricks using certain combinations of restriction enzymes, and we also hope we can teach them what the different sequences that makes a gene are used for.