Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/HP-SchoolDiffusion-SyntheticRally

Synthetic Rally

'''Description'''

One of our activities for human practices consisted in creating a rally that would teach synthetic biology to students from 9th grade. We wanted to show something that was, in some cases, difficult to explain. The plan was to teach them some basic things about molecular biology that would help them understand each of the bases of the rally, including genes and biobricks, and how they could use these to design a circuit for a project. We decided that each of the bases would represent different parts of this year’s circuit, explaining how each of the parts work. For example, base one represented the Promoter; base two, the Riboswitch, and so on.

'''Objective'''

The objective was mainly to help students understand that genetically modified machines work, basically, like a normal machine. We wanted to explain each of the parts that formed our circuit, how each of them worked according to its function, and how every part is necessary for the circuit to work. But all of these are hard to understand when you can’t see the relation between both types of machines. When you tell people who know nothing about genetic engineering that you are building a genetic machine, they have no idea of what to imagine; of how that could work. So we tried to show it to the students in the simplest way.

'''Explanation'''

The first thing we did when arriving to the school, was to organize all of the materials needed for each one of the bases. While we were doing this, three of our team members went to one of the classrooms that the school had lent us, and explained some basic things about DNA and genes to the students. They explained it in a simple manner, just so the students could understand that these were needed to form the biobricks, and these last ones to form a circuit. But that part was explained later on.

After finishing the presentation, the 40 students from the first classroom went outside, to the first base. We divided them in two groups, and gave the first twenty of them small ribands of different colors, to divide them in teams for them to compete. The other twenty were kept waiting, while some of us asked them questions for a survey about transgenic food.

We handed out one small card with the drawing of our circuit to each one of the teams from the first group; a card that we would mark, whenever they finished one of the bases, with the points they had earned. The one who came out first place would receive 4 points; second place would receive 3, and third and fourth place would receive 2. We had one person in charge of writing down the points in each card to keep track of who was winning. After explaining all of this, the rally began.

The first thing we did at each one of the bases was to identify the name; say if it was the promoter, the terminator, the RBS… and we then gave an explanation of what it was without explaining completely how it worked. At the end of the activity, we would state the relationship between what they had played and the way the actual part of the circuit functioned. Then the one in charged would yell, and they would change bases. When the first group passed to the second base, the group that was kept waiting entered the first base.

'''Bases'''

''BASE 1: PROMOTER'' - The activity was called Streets and Avenues, but the game was changed a little bit. All the teams would be aligned, forming a square, and one person from each team would be standing at each corner. That person would have to find his/her match; someone with the same color inside the square. For example, maybe someone form team Blue, inside the square, would be Yellow. The Yellow person outside would have to find that Blue person before the others found their match, with the path changing just as it does in the common “Streets and Avenues“ game.

''How does this relate to the promoter?'' The promoter needs to find the one thing that starts it, for the circuit to start too.