Team:Amsterdam/Human Outreach/Education/Introduction

From 2011.igem.org

Introductory presentations

At both universities in Amsterdam iGEM is not a known competition. There is no broad history yet and we are the first team to present a project during the jamboree. We believe that students of our universities should be taught more about iGEM, especially given that the jamboree will take place at our university. To achieve this we have been giving different presentations about iGEM and our project to the students.

IDEE Week VU University

During the introductionweek at the VU university the first years of the studies Biology, Biomedical Sciences, Health Sciences and Live and Health are shown around the faculty. Alond their way they attend several presentations and demonstrations. Our iGEM team arranged a spot during this day. During the afternoon several groups of students came by. We had prepared a short presentation in which we introduced iGEM and talked about our project. Since the entire for the students consists of attending presentations and walking across the campus, we felt the best way to introduce iGEM to them was in a interactive manner. After the presentation we let them play a game. From team wiki's from previous years we collected several interesting and entertaining projects and separated the signal and output from each other. The students received the noble task to recombine the different projects. This was followed by a short explanation of the different projects. Creativity is an important aspect of iGEM. That is why we thought it would be a cool idea to have a little contest by ourselves. Each group that came by had to come up with a new bacterium and it had to be as creative as possible. The winning bacterium was the one that produces melting cheese when a scientist is throwing foam rubber bullets at it. The most interesting to apply was the bacterium that turned beer alcohol free when a minor was drinking it. Other interesting bacteria were that could turn waste into foodparticles and bacteria that could produce money when they met an alien. The student were very enthusiastic about iGEM and about our project. A couple of them even wanted to join the iGEM team next year.

Biomolecular Sciences

During the introduction of the first year master students doing Biomolecular Sciences we also got the chance to talk about iGEM. This group was considerably bigger than the groups we had during the introductionweek presentation, so we decided to stick to a short presentation about iGEM and our project. Again, the responses were very positive and students were very enthusiastic about our project.

Medical Natural Sciences

Medical Natural Sciences students are students interested in combining physics, chemistry and maths in medical issues. These students have the required capability to discuss about our project and join iGEM next year. Giving a presentation to these students was enlightening and moreover it was nice to see so many enthusiastic people.