Team:UNICAMP-EMSE Brazil/Human Practices

General Results

We believe we were able to target the following:

1. We created an educational method (see here) to disseminate knowledge about genetic engineering and synthetic biology in schools. We could test this method and prove it's efficacy in providing to the students an overview of these scientific fields and also to make them more curious and interested about this area;

2. The DNA workshop was a wonderfull educational activity and a great experience for the students (either for us);

3. The video class that we created can be used to disseminate and promote the area in a simple language. Everyone can watch the video and might will understand:

• what is Genetic Engineering and Synthetic Biology,
• how they can be used to solve important problems
• how they are integrated in our daily life
• examples of such items

4. Additionally, a school teacher can easily reproduce what we have done (you can see the documentary here) simply by creating the see DNA workshop Kit. We provided a complete description on how-to-do this kit HERE.

5. We believe we could remove a "mystification" from scientific issues like genetic engineering, which seemed to be like "magic" for the high school students:

• The students could think by themselves how could they solve a high-impact problem using Synthetic Biology and Genetic Engineering
• They felt capable of solving problems using genetic engeneering and able to understand the main principles of this field, which seems to be so difficult that only scientists can understand. It was possible to see that they were very happy and excited about the experience, talking like scientists making hypothesis, planning experiments and expecting results.

• If you watch the Video Documentary, you will notice that there is a little piece of simbolism in the final of the video: All student groups were awarded with best projects! For us, it meant that everyone awarded by acquiring new knowledge. Thus, awards were just a natural consequence of study and learning. They believed (and they told us) that they could gain much more with knowledge than they thought before.

6. For us, the DNA workshop meant much more than just a judging requirement. We learned and grew with the developed activities.

7. We could obtain general information about knowledge in genetic engineering among the target audiences (either for the two talks (at CAEB and at EMSE) than for the high-school students from Belo Horizonte city.

8. The surveys also allowed us to obtain different views about several aspects of synthetic biology;

9. As a binational team, we could disseminate to public from our countries (Brazil and France) the knowledge acquired during the development of our project.