Our team organized a panel discussion on a highly controversial and relevant subject in German society — the use of genetic engineering in agriculture. The panel featured a balanced selection of speakers from different interest groups, including experts from the scientific community, a member of the German Bundestag, a representative of the farmers' association, as well as activists from NGOs. The discussion included questions from the audience, and arguments that are highly reflective of current German political and societal debate surrounding the issue. In agreement with our panelists, we provided an abridged transcript of the two-hour discussion, containing key arguments and standpoints. We encourage other teams to use our results to open discussions on this as well as different topics in their local communities.
Our team has collaborated with partners from academia and industry to develop and implement an extensive educational outreach program for school students. This project was designed to impart basic lab concepts and skills, inspire students using experiments and familiar concepts, and encourage a rigorous analysis, interpretation and discussion of scientific data. The program iGEM@school revolved around the practical and theoretical exploration of the morphology, life cycle, metabolism, and growth of S. cerevisiae. A detailed overview of our didactical objectives, experimental stations, and further learning activities can be found on our Education page.
We are happy to provide a collection of the educational materials produced for the iGEM@school program. These include: the implementation note, designed to offer an organizational overview of the program; the lab manual summarizing all of the experiments and theory behind the scientific inquiry of the students in a school-friendly way; a pipetting exercise, used to familiarize school students with a basic lab skill; a template of a lab report to support and guide students in the process of data analysis and scientific documentation, as well as further educational support materials. We hope that our collection of educational materials can be used by other iGEM teams or any outreach initiatives to bring modern and practical science into schools.
With our school program we have also extensively focused on accessible and affordable ways to engage with a new generation of scientists. We have deliberately made important design choices to develop a low-cost, easy-to-implement program, possible in almost every/any setting. Our hope is to make a lasting change. We aspire for our program to spark interest in science for even more school students. For this reason, our optimized program does not require any additional safety precautions or a biosafety level environment, as well as not involving any hazardous chemicals or biological materials. The used materials and chemicals are not only safe for children but also easily accessible. In our outreach program, we used an easy to prepare growth medium for incubation and a fresh yeast block, found at any supermarket, as inoculum. Although the glucose and ethanol essays performed in the program do require special kits, these have recently become more affordable and are commonly used in the households of hobby brewers. Furthermore, the practical part of the course is material- and hardware-friendly, requiring only the most basic lab equipment, like a microscope, a spectrometer, and a centrifuge.
Despite this, we want to increase accessibility and affordability in our outreach program even more. Building off the progress made by the iGEM community in the past, we have collected different DIY hardware projects, including all devices needed for the outreach program to be possible in any setting. We have included a selection of DIY lab hardware, consisting of a DIY spectrometer, incubator, microscope, and centrifuge from the teams Aachen 2018 (RWTH Aachen University, Germany) and ArtScienceBangalore 2010 (Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, India) in our collection of available educational materials. We hope the provided documents can enable more teams to initiate educational outreach in their local communities.
View the organisation and didactic instructions, description of pipetting exercises, lab manual as a resource for students, lab report template & the DIY lab instructions.
Furthermore, you can access the original outreach meterials in German: the implementation note (DE), pipetting exercise (DE), lab manual (DE) & the lab report template (DE).
We have explored a new way to reach out to our fellow students and faculty members and to invite them to become a part of the iGEM community: podcasts. For this, we collaborated with our university's podcast series "We are TUM" and developed an engaging and concise introduction to iGEM using key-points summarizing fundamental aspects, goals and values of iGEM, and the history of iGEM teams at our university. Our hope is that this key-point document would help other teams to explore new ways of communication and to reach podcast listeners of different backgrounds. The podcast episode itself, as well as the transcript, will be available for download on the internet page of our university's podcast.
Taking part in the traditional presentation of the German iGEM teams by BIOspektrum, a scientific journal focused on life sciences with over 15 000 subscribers, we were able to contribute an article about our project. You can read an editorial style introduction of our iGEM team in the included document. We hope that this traditional presentation segment encourages other teams to reach out to print media in their communities. The segment is featured in the fifth edition of the journal.
Together with team Barcelona_UB, we took to social media to raise awareness about oncology and cancer, a common element in both of our teams' projects this year. Social media is becoming a common method for outreach to new and especially younger audiences all around the globe. We hope to provide another example of a relevant Instagram collaboration campaign uniting two teams' projects by sharing the respective source material. You can read more about this social media campaign on our Collaboration page.
