Outreach event

In October, members from our team organized an outreach and education event targeted towards biology students at the Australian National University. There were three goals we wished to achieve through the event. Firstly, to inform the students about the iGEM competition and the invaluable opportunities it grants to its participants. Secondly, we wanted to showcase our work and achievements from this year’s iGEM project, and raise awareness about coral conservation. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly to us, we wanted to demonstrate how knowledge of biology is utilised in the real world to solve real problems, beyond the scope of lectures or assignments in undergraduate courses. Although lecturers always try to relate course content to real world concepts, we experienced first hand through the iGEM competition how different it is to simply learn biology, as compared to using it to develop products and solve problems.

Image taken from the outreach event, two of our members explaining our project.

Another essential aspect of synthetic biology we discussed was human practices. Biology is often taught in isolation as facts and pure knowledge. However, when we apply biology to the real world, such as in the case of synthetic biology, we of course need to consider how it will affect the lives of people form a diverse demographic; this is human practices. Through the outreach event we think we were able to share a glimpse of synthetic biology, and how they can be involved in the future.

Feedback we receieved

We received many kinds of feedback from event participants. (Quotes presented with permission)