Team:Alberta/human practices

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Latest revision as of 03:13, 28 October 2010

TEAM ALBERTA

Human Practices

A thank-you card given to us by the girls from DiscoverE.

The focus of GENOMIKON, from the beginning, was to empower anyone to try synthetic biology for themselves. This tool kit introduces synthetic biology and delivers hands-on molecular biology education in a novel and concrete way. 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 first and foremost teaches us valuable problem solving and research based skills. But iGEM is also a means of building relationships, especially orchestrating cooperation among various people from many different backgrounds. This summer, all three Albertan teams (University of Alberta, University of Calgary and the University of Lethbridge) met once in each hometown and participated in workshops. This allowed us to effectively exchange ideas and work together towards our individual project goals. aGEM, one of our regional workshops that was held in Edmonton, served as an arena in which we could present our projects to the other teams and the field's professionals. We are grateful to AITF for putting on aGEM and our other workshops.

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-As an educational kit, GENOMIKON is itself a project strongly involved with the human practices of synthetic biology. The kit is an introduction to synthetic biology teaching the next wave of students about its principles and practices, even before they enroll in university. The goal of our project was to create a functional kit capable of assembling complete plasmids to be used in educational setting and GENOMIKON is highly successful in this regard. However, the GENOMIKON kit will never teach anyone if it never makes its way to classrooms. With this in mind, we decided to do the human practice portion of our project directly addressing this problem.
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+[[Image:Alberta_DiscoverE.png|200px|thumb|A thank-you card given to us by the girls from DiscoverE.]]
+</div>
+The focus of GENOMIKON, from the beginning, was to empower anyone to try synthetic biology for themselves. This tool kit introduces synthetic biology and delivers hands-on molecular biology education in a novel and concrete way.  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==
 <div id="horiz-line"></div>
-The GENOMIKON kit has wide applications to a variety of settings.  Its most powerful application is clearly in education specifically targeted to high school students.  With this in mind our team has researched and compiled a distribution plan in an effort to provide a way in which GENOMIKON can reach students.  It consists of a cost analysis of the components to produce the kit, the available market for the kit, potential competitors, the sustainability of the market, as well as a three year plan for bringing the kit to high schools all across Canada.  We believe the GENOMIKON project has the potential to excite thousands of students allowing them to not only learn more about synthetic biology, but have the opportunity to gain a first taste of the field.
+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==
 <div id="horiz-line"></div>
-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 [[Team:Alberta/Sponsors|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.
+iGEM first and foremost teaches us valuable problem solving and research based skills. But iGEM is also a means of building relationships, especially orchestrating cooperation among various people from many different backgrounds.  This summer, all three Albertan teams (University of Alberta, University of Calgary and the University of Lethbridge) met once in each hometown and participated in workshops.  This allowed us to effectively exchange ideas and work together towards our individual project goals. aGEM, one of our regional workshops that was held in Edmonton, served as an arena in which we could present our projects to the other teams and the field's professionals.  We are grateful to [[Team:Alberta/Sponsors|AITF]] for putting on aGEM and our other workshops.