During our iGEM journey, we made a lot of experiences and created documents that can be helpful for future iGEM teams. Here you can find our resources in English, Spanish, and German.
For the visits to the botanical garden, we created a handout to educate about genetic engineering and provide links to resources. The handout is available in English, Spanish, and German to allow as many teams as possible to build upon our education approach.
As students ourselves we know we learn best when having fun. This is why we created a card game based on the ‘Dobble’ aka ‘Spot it’ game. It is a fast-paced game where you have to find a matching symbol on the cards. And there is always a matching symbol! We created our own synthetic biology symbols and crafted a card deck of 31 cards. We showed our game to high school students and people who are not from the field.
We organized an experimental school visit suitable for young students. We took an experiment from a German experimental book suitable for young students [1] and created a work sheet.
In the work sheet, the experiment steps are described and the students can note down their observations. After the experiment, they can think of a possible explanation for their observation. After the structure of the coal is revealed as the explanation, they can draw their own coal structure into the protocol. The protocol and the presentation are available in English and German.
For our collaboration with ‚Jugend Forscht‘, we created a presentation explaining the basic principles of synthetic biology and how a plasmid presentation is conducted. We created a visually appealing protocol, based on the protocol for the kit we used, for the students to guide them through the plasmid preperation. The presentation and the protocol are available in English, Spanish, and German.
For our school visit to a high level biology course, we were provided a presentation and handbook together with the BioBits® Kits by the German Association for Synthetic Biology (GASB) [2] that guide the students through the experiment. The handbook includes an introduction about the central dogma and the theory behind the experiment. Before and after the experiment, comprehensive questions are answered by the students.
We adjusted the handbook and presentation for our visit. They are available in German.