Our team visited many different schools in and close to Aachen. To give the students a better insight in the field of synthetic biology we prepared project days in cooperation with the teachers. Our overall goal was to give them an understanding of synthetic biology and microbiology, especially in the context of iGEM.

Therefore, we started out with a small presentation about synthetic biology, our project and the iGEM competition in general. However, we alsowanted to make the topic less abstract to them and put the focus on conducting little experiments with them. After the presentation and a safety instruction, we could start do some practical work and carried out several experiments with them. During the visits, we were happy to answer all of their upcoming questions as they got more and more in touch with synthetic biology, our project and iGEM.

Since we visited different grades with students of different ages, we adapted every presentation and each experiment to the particular school and their demands. After the experiments and the dialogue with the students we spend some time with the teachers to reflect on our visit. While talking to them we discovered the lack of possibilities for them to perform biological experiments in schools. To meet those needs, we created a collection of easy to understand experiments that do not require any specific equipment.

Book of experiments (To download the pdf-file, please click here)

We wished to be able to visit more schools, but for all those where we could not be in person, we designed a flyer which was sent out to 300 schools.

Monschau
First, we visited a girl’s school in Monschau on 2 days. During the first one, we talked to several teachers to plan and prepare our visit. We benefit from the teacher’s hints about which topics might be interesting for the students. It was a great pedagogical experience for us, as we had to think of a way how to explain the biological topics to students who do not have a huge biological knowledge.
We thought a lot about it and in the end, it was a great success. We could evoke curiosity and the girls asked a lot of questions about Synthetic Biology and iGEM.

Aachen
Moreover, we visited the St. Ursula Gymnasium in Aachen and presented our work to students who were learned more details about biology in school. We planned the time for presentation again with the teachers and conducted experiments in the end which we adjusted to their level of knowledge. It turned out that many students were interested in choosing a biology-related topic as their study field. This led us to explaining more about our university and talking about different subjects which are interesting for example Synthetic Biology. Later, we had a lively talk with the teachers who gave us some feedback and discussed the role of genetic engineering in Germany.

Düsseldorf
In Düsseldorf, in cooperation with 2 different schools, we organized a whole “Biotech-Day”. It was an interesting and challenging experience for us because there were 89 students for whom we needed to do a lot of preparation. But luckily, with the help of the teachers we managed to plan the day. We did not only present the theoretical background of our project, but also put emphasis on safety aspects related to synthetic biology and the experiments. Hence, we were able to initiate interesting conversations and discussed both, our project idea and the practical work in the lab.
As we prepared some long term experiments, we visited the school again after 2 days and could show the results to them. On that day, they took the chance to ask more specific questions about about Synthetic Biology and our field of study. What looked like an overwhelming organizational challenge turned out to be a great experience with students not much younger than us.