Team:Hong Kong HKUST/HP Education
Human Practices - Education
To promote synthetic biology, a synbio introductory talk and wet-lab training were organised for students from Sun Fong Chung College. There were around twenty Secondary 5 (Grade 11) students who attended the introductory talk on the 5th July and some of them were also invited to gain a hands-on experience on wet-lab on the 4th and 5th August.
OBJECTIVES
- Introduce genetic engineering and its difference with biotechnology
- Describe how genetic engineering is related to our society
- Explain iGEM and our project, Tristable Switch
- Demonstrate basic wet-lab techniques such as standard assembly and PCR
- Conduct basic experiments such as restriction digestion and ligation, and more advanced experiments such as colony PCR
FEEDBACK
The flow of the two-day lab experience was smooth and it was pleasing to see that the students were willing to learn. However, time did not seem to be sufficient to give a proper pre-experiment explanations for the students before each experiment, thus materials regarding wet-lab were explained post-experiment.
Fortunately, the students were capable of following the processes of the experiments and could appreciate the principles behind iGEM’s synthetic biology. The teacher hoped that there would be more workshops to be organised, giving more opportunities for secondary school students to gain exposure in synthetic biology.
