Girl Scouts Synthetic Biology Workshops: July 18
On July 18, we invited Girl Scouts from all over the Colonial Coast division to attend our very own Synthetic Biology workshop, complete with an official Synthetic Biology badge that our team developed through the Girl Scouts organization. Moreover, we invited parents/guardians/troop leaders to attend these workshops with the girls and held "What is SynBio?" and ethics discussions with them to address the concerns and misconceptions about synthetic biology and that we gathered from our Farmer's Market Survey last month. We worked with all ages: the first session was for Cadettes & Ambassadors, and the second session was for Brownies and Juniors. Everyone had the chance to use pipette men to load a gel with food coloring and watch as the colors separated by weight, to extract DNA from bananas, and to image fluorescent bacteria with our confocal microscope, which we used to help explain our project. In addition, the younger girls learned about DNA structure by making Twizzler/marshmallow models, and the adults and older girls all got to draw on plates with RFP/GFP expressing E. coli while learning about how we use antibiotics to select for the bacteria we want, and they made plasmid bracelets representing our part, GERALD.