Team:UZurich/Education
Education
With our outreach activities we have organized a whole range of diverse educational events. Our event excursions brought together people of different ages and diverse educational backgrounds, creating dialogues between society and science discussing synthetic biology. The different opinions about the ethics and regulations behind genetic engineering were very beneficial for us as a team too.
Our handbook serves as an educational tool to give people a fundamental understanding of the relevant topics of our project. We give an overview on the Swiss history of agriculture, analyze the differences in GMO legislations between Switzerland and the European Union and explain the different ethical arguments on the idea of genetic engineering.
Our video series provides different insights about the problems in agriculture in Switzerland and our interview partners - farmers, politicians as well as scientists - gave us promising feedback on our project.
By visiting schools, we also engaged with the younger generation. We performed various presentations and spread enthusiasm for synthetic biology in four different classes. But we went even further and organized a whole workshop where students could perform hands-on experiments with material from our own laboratory. With enough guidance, they were able to perform restriction digestion on plasmids and later interpret their results of the gel electrophoresis. The students were working on real steps of our own project which gave them unique insights into laboratory research. Many students were very excited about our project and wanted to learn more.
So in summary, we organized:
- A tour to the Federal Research Institute of Excellence in Agricultural Research
- An evening with the independent think-tank reatch to discuss the ethics behind GEOs
- A handbook on pesticides and genetic engineering in Switzerland
- An educational youtube series with farmers, politicians, entrepreneurs and scientists
- A simplified description of our project in form of a comic for easier understanding
- Teaching synthetic biology to high school students
- A collaboration with the Life Science Center where students learned how to work with plasmids
To learn more about our educational efforts, please visit our Communication page!