Team:Sheffield/episode8

	OUTREACH

Ultimately how much synthetic biology will make an impact on our lives, to a large extent, depends on people’s attitude toward it. Especially to slow down antibiotic resistance, we require novel technologies as well as informed individuals. Therefore, iGEM Sheffield 2016 has held two outreach events and manual for future iGEM teams.

STEM day

Our team participated in the University of Sheffield Discover STEM event, which aims to promote science, engineering, and maths to students from local schools and colleges. For our exhibition, we gave a presentation to introduce the students to the basic principles of synthetic biology and iGEM, and shared our experiences with the project. We then organised a mini-iGEM project. Under the expert supervision of our iGEM team members, the groups of students had to create an idea for an iGEM project and present it, using a poster as a visual aid. These creative students produced exciting, original solutions to tackle issues such as obesity, oil spills, and celiacs disease, using the principles of synthetic biology.

iGEM Edu Day

The Discovery STEM event went really well but it was mostly to promote iGEM and synthetic biology. We would like an event on a bigger scale that could educate students on the issue on antibiotic resistance while maintains the objectives of the STEM event. Hence we held a mega event: iGEM Edu Day. It contains elements of talks, science fair and iGEM competition. We first envisioned it as an outreach and collaboration opportunity. However, iGEM teams that signed up had to drop out. Nevertheless, the iGEM Edu Day was a success.

iGEM Edu Day was so successful,so much so we created a toolkit with which we can contribute to the iGEM community in the area of outreach. Future teams should be able to replicate almost the exact event we have done by following the manual. As such, even without our team’s presence, this outreach event can be continued sustainably by future iGEM teams hosting or improving the iGEM Edu Day.

Click here to download the PDF