Over the course of one week, from September 16th till September 20th, four different schools sent an average of 30 students for a workshop organized and run by our team. The competition was advertised to the schools through their counsellors as well as through flyers describing our competition.
The flyer for this workshop series can be found here.
Given the high level of responses we got at 171 registrations, we had to select students on a first-come-first- serve basis as we could only accommodate 30 students per school due to the lab capacity available.
The workshop’s primary focus was biology and engineering. Every workshop ran from 9:45 am until 2 :00 pm. A summary of the breakdown of each day’s events is shown in Table 1. The workshop was kickstarted with an introduction to iGEM, the different tracks available, emphasizing the global scale of the competition as well as the fact that high school, graduate as well as undergraduate teams were eligible to participate. They were also introduced briefly to the field of synthetic biology.
During the introduction, the students were told that they will be contacted in a week with information about a competition for which they could form their own teams. They were not, however, informed of the specifics at the time so as to be fair to students whose workshops were later in the week.
The students were then introduced briefly to the field of synthetic biology, then split into two seperate groups, for the engineering and biology workshops.
