Team:Alberta/human practices

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TEAM ALBERTA

Human Practices

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.

Distribution Plan and Market Analysis

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.

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.