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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 biobrick assembly methods in a textbook. We also concider our matchmaker an important part of our outreach effort. More info about Researchers' night, our textbook chapter, and the matchmaker is given below.
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! Some photos from last year's event can be seen in the carousel below.
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.
In the middle of the summer, we got the idea of the Matchmaker. What brought us to this idea was the fact that if you haven't already arranged a cooperation with another iGEM team, it is hard to find someone to cooperate with. We also knew that the NTNU iGEM team 2011 made many attempts to cooperate with other teams by sending out several emails, but they never recieved any answers. So we decided to make the Matchmaker, and so far, we think it has been very useful. Hopefully, you think so too! Even if it came quite late in the summer, it was used by several teams, and we hope it can be used by future iGEM teams as well.
Early in the semester, we was asked by our advisor, Rahmi Lale, to write a chapter on biobrick assembly method for a text book he and Svein Valla, Professor at Dept. of Biotechnology, NTNU, are editing. The text book in question is called 'DNA cloning methods', and is part of the book series '[http://www.springer.com/series/7651 Methods in Molecular Biology]' published by Humana Press.
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