We would like to thank all members of our team: A. Domingo, F. Fletcher, A. Lamb, S. Maier, A. Morgan, J. Murphy, E. Dupre Sarmiento, R. Sharma, P. Thota, J. Razon, R. Vos de Wael. Team members really did share the workload this year, and while some of us had more specialized jobs, we all took turns engaging the community, learning lab skills and design thinking.

We would like thank our wonderful teachers Ms. Jessica Puurunen and Mr. Luc Arvisais, for without their guidance, our project would not have been possible.

Our mentors from Fredsense Technologies, David Lloyd and Lisa Oberding, have been instrumental in the development of our constructs, in supporting lab bench work (transformations and in-house workshops), and in the overall success of our project. We continue to learn much about genetics and synthetic biology from them!

We extend a big thank you to Dr. Magdalena Pop from Mindfuel’s Greekstater program, as well as the University of Alberta iGEM team, who provided us with support and guidance (and purified mCherry to test!).

Julie Legault and Justin Pahara from Amino Labs graciously hosted two members of our team at Amino to support lab work (more transformation attempts and mini-prepping) and have been important mentors and supporters throughout our journey.

We also wish to thank Jay Anthonypillai from Berkeley Biolabs, Kat Zorina from IDEO, Peter Duck, the head of Canmore Waste Management, James Bachmann from LaFarge, Emile Naicker who helped with our team logistics, our graphics person, Hayley Finnigan, the Edmonton Community Foundation, the Bow Valley Credit Union, the Our Lady of the Snows School Council, BioBasic (for financial support in gene synthesis), and all of our other sponsors and community members for their encouragement and support.

Thank you to flaticon.com for the menu icons and Pixabay for public domain stock images.

Summary

Project support and advice: Mindfuel mentors Lisa Oberding and David Lloyd, and Mindfuel’s geekStarter Program.

Fundraising help and advice: Teacher Advisors for their help in grant writing, and Mindfuel for program funding and special prizes and awards along the way.

Lab support: Special thanks to Jess Puurunen (teacher advisor) for supporting our hands-on lab work in our own high school, and for Amino Labs (Justin Pahara and Julie Legault) for direct support in mini-prepping with us, and also to Fredsense mentors for performing transformations for us when we could not complete this successfully on our own!

Project advisor support: Thanks to the Mindfuel specialist mentors and the collegiate level professor advisors who provided advice along the way, and gave us much appreciated feedback into how we could improve our project and try to test out our constructs.

Wiki support: To Elian Dupre Sarmiento (team member with the coding skills!) and to Mr. Arvisais for helping us meet the wiki freeze deadline.

Presentation coaching: To our teacher advisors and Mindfuel mentors and program supporters; thank you for providing us with so many opportunities to practice our presentations in front of judges, and to hone our presenting skills.