As already mentioned multiple times on our wiki, our team wanted to contribute to a more sustainable world through our project, but also by creating awareness. This being said, we wanted to take it a step further. We wanted to inspire more people to go into STEM and potentially change the world themselves in their later careers. For this, we soon realized that we would have to go to a secondary school, and that’s exactly what we did!
Considering we had 90 minutes, we wanted to make an interesting and engaging presentation that wouldn’t bore out the students. Hence, our presentation consisted of four parts:
- Science in general: who does science, what does a scientist do all day, what are publications, what is peer review, and so forth.
- Biotechnology and synthetic biology: explanation of basic science related to the field and applications such as insulin production. This part also mentioned our iGEM project.
- How to present a STEM project?: We wanted to include this since the class has a poster presentation in the second semester. Vitor, our PI, was very kind and gave us a couple of posters that we could show the class as props. We also sent those in digital format to the teacher afterwards.
- Careers in STEM: This links back to the idea of inspiring people. After all, to be inspired to start studying a STEM field or aim for a STEM career, one needs to know what options there are first.
We would like to thank An Weuts, the teacher of the 6th grade STEM class that we went to, for this opportunity and for her help. This wouldn’t have been possible otherwise!
