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Team:Alberta/human practices
From 2010.igem.org
Human Practices
GENOMIKON itself serves as a human practices project. This tool kit introduces synthetic biology and delivers hands-on molecular biology education to future scientists. GENOMIKON is bound to instill excitement and creativity in high school classrooms. Our goal was to create a comprehensive kit for the rapid and effective construction of plasmids using limited and affordable technology. In this way, GENOMIKON is readily accessible to public educational institutions. However, GENOMIKON will never be able to teach anyone if it never makes its way into classrooms. With this in mind, we decided to address this issue by incorporating human practice elements into our projects. In particular, we investigated the market in which GENOMIKON would enter and invited middle school girls from DiscoverElle and high school students into our laboratory to learn about synthetic biology and participate in an experiment using GENOMIKON.
Distribution Plan and Market Analysis
Our team began imagining ways to place GENOMIKON in each and every high school all around the world. To address this issue of accessibility, undergraduate students from the University’s School of Business created a hypothetical business plan and market analysis to bring GENOMIKON to the market. The GENOMIKON business plan uses the marketplace because it is the most efficient means to manufacture and distribute a good to the greatest number of consumers. This business plan is designed to help our project to have the biggest impact on humanity to share the knowledge of synthetic biology to as many people as possible.
Social Aspect
iGEM within Alberta is about making lifelong friends and colleagues, as well as learning valuable problem solving and research based skills. All the Alberta teams (University of Alberta, University of Calgary and the University of Lethbridge) met at least once in each hometown to exchange ideas and work together towards our individual project goals in workshops and our yearly aGEM competition. aGEM serves as a testing ground for each teams projects and allows each team to receive feedback from experts in multiple disciplines and from the other teams. The close relationships between the teams is helped by AITF, which helps to collaborate aGEM among the other meetings. The Albertan teams may compete against each other, but we all enjoyed taking each other out on the town during the three times we met this year and, exchanging ideas with one another.
