Team:St Andrews/Partnership

OUR TIMELINE

June 27TH

iGem United Kingdom and Ireland meet-up on zoom

June 28TH

Reached out to KCL about a potential collaboration

July 7TH

Meeting was set up on zoom

July 13TH

Meeting with KCL on zoom about their Biologix competition, they asked us to deliver a lecture about environmental solutions using synthetic biology for their competition lecture series.

July 20TH

Reached out to KCL to expand our collaboration to partnership.

July 24TH

Meeting with KCL regarding our partnership and asking them to help us develop our educational material.

August 4TH

We delivered our Biologix lecture for their competition.

August 23RD

They sent us their workshop.

MID-SEPTEMBER

We gave out education material to primary schools, in Scotland, including KCL's workshop.

Writing

Throughout the season our main iGEM partner was King’s College London’s iGEM team. After our first contact at the iGEM UK and Ireland meet-up, where they informed us about their competition called Biologix. The competition is aimed at upper secondary high schools in south London in order to encourage students to become more involved in STEM and become aware of what synthetic biology is and its real-life applications. They asked us if we were willing to deliver a lecture for their lectures series about solving environmental problems using synthetic biology, which we happily agreed on and in return they offered us to use their modelling website. However, our team came to the conclusion that we would not be able to do any modelling this summer due to that most of it was done by last year’s team and we wanted to focus on other areas of the project. Nevertheless, we found other areas of collaboration and we soon realised that we both have a common aim of educating students about what synthetic biology is and all its possibilities. We, therefore, asked them to partner up with us to reach this aim, we wanted to help them with their lectures series for their competition and they would help us develop a workshop series aimed at primary school children. As a result of our partnership, both teams were able to reach a larger audience of students of different ages rather than one age group.

The partnership was also very successful and mutually beneficial as we exchanged contacts and ideas. We gave them some contacts to Scottish high schools that we thought would be interested in the competition and they gave us ideas of what type of activities with could do for the primary school children. Additionally, they gave us advice on other groups that we would be able to contact for our workshops such as different science camps.

We also helped each other through visibility as they helped us distribute our survey and we helped them with advertising their competition.

Figure 1. St Andrews presentation during Biologix

Figure 2. KCL’s presentation for primary school kids.