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Team:TP CC-SanDiego/Outreach.html
From 2014hs.igem.org
How to form an iGEM team from scratch
This year TP_CC-San Diego made the video, "How to Form an iGEM Team From Scratch", that focuses on how to make an iGEM team, or get a mentor, do research, and overcome some of the obstacles along the way (e.g. financial). The video provides various tips and advices to create and self-support and support a science team like iGEM, from the members of the team who previously were a part of iGEM. The purpose of the video is to propagate research to many schools through setting them up for iGEM. We have currently emailed this video along with an introduction to iGEM and an offer to guide interested students in the process of forming a team to 300 schools in California . For the underprivileged ones, we offered them assistance in setting up a team or just getting the students into some sort of research. We hope to see new inspired teams from California, and hope to facilitate interested students’ pursuit for research and scientific discoveries.
Education is collaboration.
This year our team is a collaboration between two neighbor schools - Torrey Pines High School and Canyon Crest Academy. Since Torrey Pines had a successful first year during last year, this year we reached out to our neighbor schools. Lectures were done at Canyon Crest Academy, and laboratory works were done at Torrey Pines High School and then the Simpson Joseph Laboratory.
Pursuing knowledge.
In the beginning of the year, many students who were interested in participating in iGEM were unfamiliar with the details about synthetic biology. We contacted UCSD graduate and Ph.D students from biochemistry labs and the mentors from the Hasty Lab at UCSD provided us various lectures on synthetic biology. These lectures mainly focused on teaching the students basic lab skills and the science behind the lab processes. Students also studied from DNA Science: A First Course, Second Edition by David Micklos and Greg A. Freyer. The lectures were open to anyone in the neighborhood, including non-iGEM members interested in learning about synthetic biology and students from different high schools.
