Team:Carnegie Mellon/Hum-Outreach
From 2012.igem.org
Summer presentations to high school students
With the goal of reaching out to and educating Pittsburgh area high school students about synthetic biology, we organized several sessions where we introduced synthetic biology to students, talked about state-of-the-art, goals and obstacles of the field, and presented our iGEM project.
This was the schedule and audience of our presentations:
In these presentations (see our slides here), we used the built circuit kit to visualize and demonstrate the main aspects of our project.
Using the circuit kit, we demonstrated to the students a simulation of the fluorescent sensor, which reveals promoter characteristics. We plotted graphical representations of mRNA and protein production, and then analyzed the changes in the output when certain parts of the sensor model are removed or changed. Finally, we ranked a group of promoters that can be interchanged in the model by strength based on the graphical data we plotted.
From our presentation, the students were able to learn about:
Photos...
Future outreach plans
The circuit will be the basis for a kit to be used by HS biology teachers in classrooms in public schools in Pittsburgh. The goal is to incorporate Synthetic Biology in the HS curriculum. The kit will be implemented by DNAZone, the outreach program of CNAST, and become part of their lending library of teaching materials.
Educational Objectives