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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
With our goal in mind, we investigated exactly how GENOMIKON could be placed in high schools across the world and incorporated into grade 12/senior curricula. To address the issue of accessibility, undergraduate students from the University of Alberta's School of Business created a hypothetical distribution plan and market analysis designed to bring GENOMIKON to the market. This model is aimed to educate students across the world on the science behind and potential of genetic engineering. GENOMIKON will only be an effective teaching tool if it reaches students.
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.
