Education

Our team believes education is incredibly important in improving the world, and so this year we endeavoured to bring our project, iGEM, and synthetic biology as a whole out into our own community.

Family Day

Every February, the University of Lethbridge hosts a fun Family Day event. The purpose of this day was to introduce the community to the university in a fun and engaging way. Our team took part in organising a few of the STEM activities. These activities included learning how to pipette by mixing coloured water in test tubes, playing with molecule sets to learn about the structures of the world in an easily digestible fashion, and colouring images of germs to teach the community about the appearances of what can make humans and animals sick. We also showed our iGEM project proposal and explained our project to many of the interested families visiting our station. These activities that we organised allowed families and kids to have fun while learning about science and our project.

Family Day

Summer Camp

For part of our education goals, we decided to partner with Destination Exploration, a youth STEM outreach program at the University of Lethbridge, and organise multiple activity days with the summer camps. The focus of these experiences was to teach the kids how engaging and enjoyable the lab can be. We chose the activities to be attention-grabbing and fun at the same time. Our team introduced the children to the lab environment, and taught them about pH, acids, bases, and DNA structure through immersive, hands-on activities we developed as a group. The kids seemed to be really interested and it was overall a great experience!

Summer Camps

SHAD

This summer we also helped teach a group of high school students about wet lab experiments. The University of Lethbridge has a cohort of SHAD students, and for one of their activities they did a mini-prep with Dr. Laura Keffer-Wilkes. SHAD is a Canada-wide program where students stay at a university for about a month and learn about STEM. As our team has experience doing mini-preps, we decided to help out and taught the SHAD students. The main activity was practising pipetting, so we got to assist the students with the hands-on practice. It was amazing to connect with other students around our grade level interested in STEM. We also were able to teach them about iGEM since some of the students did not know what it was.

Our Solution

Tech Futures Challenge

This section is all about the TFC.

TFC Awards

BioTreks

This section is all about BioTreks paper and conference.

BioTreks Logo

High School Symposium

This section is all about the high school meet up on September 28.

TFC Awards

Chinook Symposium

This section is all about Chinook Symposium.

Chinook Symposium