Team:SMTexas/BrendanCourt

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<header><h2>Our Work with Brendan Court</h2></header>
<header><h2>Our Work with Brendan Court</h2></header>
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<p>The team has also been working with many agencies to help promote the spread of biotechnology especially for the youth. One of the agencies that we worked with is Brendan Court. Brendan Court is a four-week, tuition-free enrichment program for middle school boys that is hosted annually at St. Mark's School of Texas. These students are exposed to many opportunities that may not be available at their own schools, such as photography, computer and word processing, physical education, poetry workshops, model rocket building, and more. The St. Mark's iGEM team wanted to add bio-engineering to this list, and we worked exclusively with the students for one day. We gave them a tour of the lab and introduced them to the work that we did. We gave a presentation about lung cancer and how a bio-sensor would be able to detect the disease in early stages and save lives. We also allowed the students to participate in biology labs and gain some hand-on experience. They observed slides of different cells through microscopes and breathed into bromothymol blue solutions through a straw. Most of the solutions change color as the students exhaled, but some of the solutions contained a buffer and as a result did not experience any pH or color change. Finally, we showed them some simple science demonstrations with dry ice and elephant paste.</p>
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<p>The team has also been working with many agencies to help promote the spread of biotechnology especially for the youth. One of the agencies that we worked with is Brendan Court. Brendan Court is a four-week, tuition-free enrichment program for middle school boys that is hosted annually at St. Mark's School of Texas. These students are exposed to many opportunities that may not be available at their own schools, such as photography, computer and word processing, physical education, poetry workshops, model rocket building, and more. The St. Mark's iGEM team wanted to add bio-engineering to this list, and the team worked exclusively with the students for one day. We divided the forty-four students into four groups, and we worked with two of the groups at a time. One of the two groups received a ten-minute presentation about synthetic biology as well as the harmful effects of smoking while the other group watched us perform science demonstrations. Using a straw, the students blew into a cup with a bromothymol blue and sodium hydroxide solution and observed the effects of the effects of the carbon dioxide they exhaled. Bromothymol blue is a pH indicator that turns blue in a base and yellow in an acid. When the students exhaled carbon dioxide into the solution, the carbon dioxide reacts with the water to form carbonic acid which disassociates to hydrogen ions and carbonate. This makes the solution acidic, and the color of the solution changes. We also showed them how to make elephant toothpaste using dishwasher soap, 30% hydrogen peroxide solution, and potassium iodide. We first mixed the hydrogen peroxide and the soap, and after adding the potassium iodide, the chemicals react to expand and form a gooey paste. We also prepared microscopes and some interesting slides, such as some tissue or cells, for the students to observe. Finally, the demonstation group made "super-tang," an orange-soda drink by adding dry ice to an orange-flavored liquid. The dry ice carbonates the drink, giving it the fizzy taste.</p>
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Revision as of 15:27, 18 June 2014