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From 2012hs.igem.org

Outreach and Human Practices

One of the main goals of our team was to spread awareness of iGEM and bioengineering in our community. We are the inaugural iGEM team in our school, so no one knew who we were or what we did. We did a few outreach projects to spread awareness of iGEM in our school and community.

Take a quick quiz to test your Carbon Monoxide knowledge at this link: CO Quiz!

What we have done

Commercial: We filmed a "What is iGEM?" commercial that detailed what our club does and what bioengineering is in a fun and entertaining manner. This video was shown to the entire school this spring.

News Story: Thanks to Lizzie Barrett, one of our team contributors wrote an news article about our new club. It included quotes from different iGEMers and even a quote from our principal! This was published in a local printing called Neighbor to Neighbor, which is distributed to every house in Tyngsboro and Dunstable.

"Neighbor-to-Neighbor" Spring 2012 Lizzie Barrett, Public Relations

Fundraising: Unfortunately, science can be expensive. To provide funds for our club to be used towards lab expenses, buying antibiotics, and purchasing geeky tee-shirts, we did a few fundraisers over the year. For details about our fundraisers, please go here. For information about our amazing sponsors and supporters who donated money, supplies, time, services and support, please go here.

Grant: We applied for and received a grant from the Educational Foundation of Tyngsboro for start up funds for developing a basic molecular biology lab for students at our school.

Academic Excellence Awards Ceremony June 7, 2012 Left: Martina Witts, Board Member, EFT Right: Rebekah Ravgiala

Future Plans:

We are always thinking up new and exciting ideas. Here are some of our ideas that were too big for us to do on such short notice, but that we definitely want to do next year. Some of them are already underway!

iGEM APP: We are working on developing an iGEM iPod app. It will be a fun game, with information about the practices of genetic engineering worked into it. It is still in its development stages and we hope to have it completed for next year.

DNA Day: A whole day to celebrate biology and science as a whole! We wanted to run activities and games related to science, biology and of course, iGEM!

Science is Elementary Day: The idea behind this day was to bring science to our public elementary school. We wanted to make science fun, hands on, and accessible for the younger children. We hope to make the children realize that science was fun and make them interested in science!