Team:Uppsala-Sweden/HumanPractice/Protocol

The human practice approach of Team Uppsala-Sweden this year has been focusing on how to recognize an alternative approach to human practice and at the same time include presentations and being featured in journals to such a large extent as possible. The achievements have been performing presentations, getting attention in journals and at websites but also to write an article in the magazine Biologen (transl. The biologist). Thereby we have in a large extent displayed ourselves and the subject synthetic biology to a large and varied crowd of people. Biologen is a magazine that is presented to biology teachers from secondary school up to high-school level. Our purpose of writing this article was to present synthetic biology in a simple but informative way and to present our project and the participation in iGEM. We also put emphasis in urging to educate both the readers themselves and their students in the field of genetic engineering and synthetic biology as an approach seen in figure 1. We feel that teachers have the pedagogical tools to educate in a simple and informative way and because of that they are the perfect target group for the purpose of spreading the knowledge. At the same time we took the opportunity at hand and presented the possibility for them to be a part of high-school iGEM. Figure 1.The figure describes the information flow by passing the information to the teachers. These teachers can in turn give their information to the students which theoretically can result in a massive information flow where the awareness of synthetic biology will spread massively compared to single presentations done by us as an iGEMteam.

The first presentation were held at DAX which is a day dedicated to biotechnology students at university level in Uppsala. Here we presented Synthetic biology, our project and tried to enhance the amount of people to participate in iGEM. The presentations we had was one at the high school, Katedralskolan in Uppsala in front of a class of students studying nature science with the focus of biotechnology. At this presentation we first addressed the areas of application with synthetic biology approach and then we performed a workshop where the students were urged to think of their own synthetic biology invention. After the presentation we were told by the teacher that the whole event was successful and that the students were inspired by synthetic biology.