Outreach to the community
TEDxTukuy
The opportunity to present in the TEDxYouth@Tukuy conference 2019 was given to 2 members of the team, Ana Lucía Campos and Karina Vestergaard. They decided to talk about synthetic biology to send a message that inspired other young students to work on their goals.
GIN conference
We contacted GIN, an organization that dedicates itself to empower young people to collaborate locally, regionally, and globally in order to create project-based sustainable solutions for global issues and every year they have a conference. We were able to participate in their conference this year. We again gave a presentation about synthetic biology, our project and it’s impact to the 500 people at the GIN Conference.
Salon del cacao
Alianza Cacao invited the team to an exhibition about Peruvian cacao. It included presentation of a metastudy about cadmium in cacao beans by Dr. Rachel Atkinson, an associate scientist at Biodiversity International. The team had the opportunity to talk to her about the details of her study and the possibility of applying synthetic biology to it. She thought the project was best for detection of cadmium.
Additionally, the event had a panel of experts consisting of chocolatiers, agricultors, scientists, among others. Our teammates, Miski and Analu, were chosen as panelists to give an overview of our project and how it could be used to address their problem.
STEM clubs
The first step was to spread knowledge within the school communities, sharing the importance of science in daily life through STEM programs that involved teaching younger students. Both programs had a similar structure, starting the lessons with an experiment and then explained the science behind it. At Hiram Bingham, several topics and experiments were done like colored flames, Elephant toothpaste, and more with 5th-grade students. At FDR, other topics that were a bit more challenging were covered including DNA structure and the structures of cells with middle school students