Team:Calgary/Human Practices/Outreach/Campus Events

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University of Calgary

HUMAN PRACTICES INDEX

Overview

Updates

Ethics

Fundraising

Media

Outreach

Biological Safety
Notebook & Parts

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY EVENTS: ESTABLISHING A CAMPUS-WIDE PRESENCE

An important part of our Outreach activities were centered around establishing a campus-wise presence for the University of Calgary iGEM team. Not only is this a good way to get the message out to the community, but in in order to ensure the continued success of our team, it is important for a number of reasons. For one, we want to raise awareness and generate interest for iGEM among undergraduates that may consider joining our team in the future. This year our team is made up of individuals from a variety of different faculties and we want to continue this. The University of Calgary is also an important sponsor of our team. To thank them and encourage their continued support, it's important to keep the University informed of what we're up to. Apart from the success of our iGEM team, a campus-wide presence also allows us to reach a wide-base of students that may be interested in the emerging field of Synthetic Biology. One of our goals this year was to begin to establish a synthetic Biology community in Alberta and reaching out to undergraduates is an important part of this. If we hope to see Synthetic Biology courses or programs here, we need students as well as professors to be interested in the field. Our activities included three research symposiums, participation in the University of Calgary campus fair as well as participation in 'Discovery Days', an event put on by the faculty of Medicine.

CAMPUS FAIR: JUNE 6TH

The University of Calgary Campus Fair was one of the first campus events we participated in. Campus Fair is an annual event held for children to explore science, media, engineering, and the arts through fun activities. The goal is to inspire them to think of the possibilities in the future, and showcase the different programs and faculties present at the U of C.

At Campus Fair, our team had a booth set up with fun crafts and contests. We made craft kids for children to make their own bacteria art, and ran pipetting competitions. While this was a lot of fun for the kids present, we also wanted to spread the word about iGEM and our project. Along with these activities, we set up the iGEM poster from last year's team, prompting questions about what iGEM was. These came from parents, older siblings, volunteers, and other faculty members that were present at the fair. Thus, we were able to speak about synthetic biology and our iGEM project to many individuals.

For more details and pictures of this event, click HERE for our news article.

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH PROGRAM (USRP) RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM: SEPTEMBER 23RD

On September 23rd, the University of Calgary iGEM team had another chance to display our work at the Markin Undergraduate Student Research program symposium (USRP). This symposium features summer undergraduate research projects from a variety of faculties at the University. We participated in the poster session, submitting two of our posters. This was a great chance to showcase our work to other students and faculty at the university, working on establishing more of a campus-wide presence for iGEM. We set up a demonstration of Second Life and gave out handouts to people on the four aspects of our project. We had a lot of fun talking about our work and it gave us some practice explaining our project to people outside the field, with no prior knowledge of iGEM or of synthetic biology. This was the first of a few research symposiums that the University of Calgary iGEM team will be participating in over the next couple of weeks. Upcoming symposiums include the BHSC Symposium in October and the University of Calgary Student Union Research Symposium in November.

BACHELOR OF HEALTH SCIENCES (BHSc) RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM: OCTOBER 1ST

The University of Calgary iGEM team was fortunate to give poster and oral presentations at the Bachelor of Health Sciences (BHSc) Research Symposium on October 1st, 2009. The goal of this annual symposium is to get young undergraduate students with no research experience interested in research by showcasing summer projects. Although this symposium was important as a means of practicing presentation and poster skills for iGEM, we also used this opportunity to recruit students for UofC iGEM 2010.

As few students knew exactly what we were doing, our mission was to get the word out about iGEM. We did this by first explaining iGEM and Synthetic Biology, and then by delving into the four aspects of our project: lab, modeling, Second Life and human practices. Students seemed quite surprised that undergraduates were able to manipulate DNA to produce cool functions in the wetlab. Moreover, our Second Life initiative was showcased and received quite a lot of interest and great feedback because of the innovated platform to teach students about synthetic biology. We also let the students attending the symposium know about the academic backgrounds and interests of all of our members. They found it quite surprising that most of our members are either 1st or 2nd year students (this seemed quite young!) from not only health sciences, but engineering, computer science and kinesiology as well.

The UofC iGEM team stood out from the other research projects because we showed the students that research doesn’t have to be strictly science. They understood that although iGEM is a competition in synthetic biology, it is moving away from simply biology and requires teams to pursue other initiatives (such as outreach and ethics) within the field to be recognized as successful projects. We received a great number of questions about our project and the role of every individual in our project. The amount of interest about iGEM demonstrated by the undergraduates far surpassed anything we had expected. We hope that we got the message across that the UofC iGEM team strives to create a multifaceted project and that in order to achieve this goal, we require enthusiastic students from all types of academic backgrounds. There’s no doubt that our participation in the BHSc Research Symposium will increase the number of students wanting to be a part of UofC iGEM 2010.