Second Life Study Day 1

Today, we began a week-long study using the program Second Life that was designed by the 2009 University of Calgary iGEM team under Sonja Georgijevitch. Second Life is an engine that allows various islands to be used to teach different things. It is used by several schools to teach courses and last year's iGEM team designed a "world" in Second Life that could be used to teach iGEM students. This program is also useful for teaching undergraduate students the rudiments of synthetic biology. It will cover different aspects that are important for iGEM such as ethics, lab methods, the iGEM Registry, and general synthetic biology. We registered in the program and spent the day familiarizing ourselves with the basic elements of synthetic biology and moving around in the program itself.