We made presentations introducing genetic engineering to students of class 11 and 12 (equivalent to high school sophomores and seniors respectively) in 5 different schools across 3 different cities.
Broadly, the presentations had 3 parts:

a. Definitions of some basic terms used in genetic engineering such as gene, promoter, operator, inducer, reporter etc and how to put together these modular components in constructing genetic circuits.

b. A simple, binary framework for quantitatively analyzing the outputs of simple genetic circuits.

c. Introduction to iGEM, our project and some previous years’ projects.

In enhancing the awareness of high school students about genetic engineering and iGEM, most teams undertake some form of a. and c.; however, we think we stand out by including b., a technique by which students would be able to quantitatively predict the output of the circuits they construct. The objective was to convey that genetic engineering is a diverse area with inputs from biological and more abstract areas of science and engineering.

The presentation was followed by a questionnaire presented to the audience to see how the presentation changed the audience’s knowledge of the topics (related to our iGEM project) and their views about the importance of the question addressed by our iGEM project.
The collaboration was during the presentations in Chennai, the city in which our collaborating college, SVCE is located. The point of the collaboration was that the iGEM projects of both the teams could be presented to the students and since our projects were quite different (ours was basic while theirs was applied research) and we could give the students exposure about the challenges in both these types of projects.