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Team:Peking/HumanPractice/SowingTomorrowSyntheticBiologists
From 2012.igem.org
Human Practice
Sowing Tomorrow Synthetic Biologists
Overview
Synthetic Biology possesses huge potential of application to boost a nation's economy and improve people's lives, as well as enhance our understanding of the origin of life. As an emerging field combining conventional Biology with physical sciences and engineering principles, Synthetic Biology calls for more lively and intelligent young men to generate ideas with great potential. That's the motivation of our human practice project, "Sowing Tomorrow Synthetic Biologists". Based on our goal, we desire to motivate high school students to study Synthetic Biology and guide them towards future participation in the iGEM high school division.
In early May, several of our team members went to The Second High School attached to Beijing Normal University, to know more about the Beijing high school students. We realized that the students have little knowledge about Synthetic Biology and iGEM, so we decided to give a series of lectures to promote the high school students' awareness of Synthetic Biology.
In order to get in touch with all of the high schools in Beijing and to ensure our propagation of Synthetic Biology to students to be a long-term project, we went to Beijing Teenageer Science & Technology Club for help. Some of us went to the office of the club and gave a presentation to the chief secretary and other teachers. Our efforts impressed them and finally we agreed to work together. Additionally, the club also paved the way for our lectures.
On July 14th, we gave a series of lectures to Beijing high school students, under the theme of "Life as Machines --- Rational Design for Artificial Biological Systems", presenting a basic concept and research methods of Synthetic Biology and introducing affairs of the iGEM HS Division. The lectures turned to be a huge success. After the lecture, most of students came close to the Peking iGEM team members and actively asked for suggestion about forming an iGEM team and for guidance of their experiments.
Later, according to the datas on questionaires we gathered after the lectures, we made it clear what we should do next. In fact, our lectures helped to propage the concepts of SB and iGEM competition to high school students, most of who didn't know about those issues. Some students are willing to participate in the iGEM competition while others are not due to academic and financial shortage.
Therefore, we decided to write a report together with a teacher from Beijing No.4 High School to apply for a specific funding for Beijing high school students to participate in the iGEM competition; on the other hand, we began to guide students from The Second High School attached to Beijing Normal University towards their future participation in iGEM competition.
