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Team:UNICAMP-EMSE Brazil/Human Practices
From 2011.igem.org
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Overview
This year our team prepared three different human practices, each one facing a distinct public and with a different proposals. As a binational team, we could disseminate to public from our countries (Brazil and France) the knoledge acquired during the development of our project. Additionally, we decide to innovate, creating a didactical method to teach genetic engineering in schools, to a public that have never heard about this scientific field. We were very happy with our results, specially with the high school students feedback. They were very enthused about the Video class and DNA workshop we prepared to them. Also, they became very interested in learning about genes, promoters, devices and important issues related to them.
Click the images below to see each Human Practices we have done:
General Results
We believe we were able to target the following:
1. We created an educational method (see here) to disseminate knoledge about genetic engineering and synthetic biology in schools and we could test this method and prove it's efficacy in providing to the students an overview of this scientific fields and also to get their attention and turn them more interested in this area;
2. The see 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 to solve problems and saw that were able to understand the simple principles of genetic engineering. They were very happy and we think that they felt important and more included in society. They felt like little scientists!
- 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 knoledge. Thus, awards were just a natural consequence of study and learning. They believed (and they told us) that they could gain much more with knoledge than they thought before.
6. For us, the see 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 knoledge 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 views about different aspects of synthetic biology;
9. As a binational team, we could disseminate to public from our countries (Brazil and France) the knoledge acquired during the development of our project.
