Team:Nevada/human practice

Our team's various human practice projects aimed to introduce our project and synthetic biology in general to the public. Because we believe many of the controversies and concerns involving synthetic biology stem from a lack of education and discussion, and because we believe scientific awareness should be spread to all age groups, we tried to reach out to a diverse range of people at various events and through various media.

Bill Nye The Science Guy Science Expo

On September 6th, Bill Nye The Science Guy came to our University to give a talk. The University decided to throw a science fair for the kids. We set up our rice catching game and taught the public how iRICE could, dare we say it, CHANGE THE WORLD!

The Vitamin Catching Game

In our pursuit to help the public understand what we are doing, we created a game that demonstrates how we are binding vitamins to rice. With a swimming noodle, velcro ball catchers, and a few tennis balls, we have created a rice grain that will grab onto our vitamin tennis balls.

College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources Valley Road Field Day

On September 8th, Team Nevada presented their research to the public at the CABNR's Valley Road Field Day. We taught children the roles of various organelles in the cell with the use of jello and candies.

A Survey of the Effects of Education on Attitudes Toward GM Rice and iRICE
One of our goals for our project was to see if people would eat our iRICE. We decided to conduct a survey to inform the public of golden rice and iRICE and get their opinions on it. An interesting issue arose when we conducted our survey and that was that the public was not informed very much on GMO's in general. Our survey actually turned out to be more beneficial as a teaching tool than a survey. The more we presented the pro's and con's, the more accepting the public became of GMO's.