Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/hp dnaweek

Even though iGEM has been in our high school since 2012, most students still didn’t know what it is about. We have as a goal that future generations inside CIDEB show more interest and curiosity towards biology, and as a consequence, towards iGEM.

We, as a team, consider important that, if we want everybody to know what iGEM is and that our high school is involved, the starting point must be inside our own institution.

With the purpose of spreading iGEM and our project, and taking advantage of the international DNA Day (April 25th), we organized the DNA Week.

Our DNA week consisted of a series of presentations and activities, which were given to all classes of the generation that has a chance to be part of the next iGEM CIDEB team. We asked permission to 3 different biology teachers, and we organized the dates and hours in a 4-day schedule, in May 12th, 13th, 14th, and 16th. We did a Power Point Presentation with information about iGEM and our project. We also performed two activities referring to synthetic biology and to our project between the information given, with the purpose of keeping the audience interested in what we were talking about.

Results

We achieved our objective. During the explanation, the students appeared surprised and interested about the IGEM competition and our project. The response given by the rest of the students, of curiosity and participation, is a very important approach because we awoke their scientific interest and their enthusiasm to do something related to it. By listening to us and playing the games, students became closer to the team members asking more about how we were doing with our project, what should they do if they want to participate, what do we do in each one of our sub teams (math model, human practices, safety, etc.), and they were even asking us about the posters we collocated around the school. They showed a lot of interest. Even teachers approached the team to know about our work.

Image. “Let’s play!”: Students transforming a normal bacteria into E.CARU.

While the last year’s project was only known by a few students, this year is a completely different situation. Now, thanks to activities like this, most of the students at CIDEB know about iGEM. This is a good thing because some of them will form the new iGEM CIDEB generation next year, and the possibilities of gaining members who are really interested has increased, since they are expecting to approach it.