Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Bringing Biotechnology to Schools: otyp”.
So my name is james pyre and i started along with these two gents. A little company called otite kyle lawson, i’m an industrial designer and a co-owner of otype. So we produce kits for high schools that teach them the basics and the foundations of biotechnology. And then we also manufacture are working on manufacturing, lab equipment. Pieces of biotech equipment are really expensive and teachers are only going to be using them for a couple weeks out of the year. They only do this biotechnology unit. One time we’ve come up with a clever plan to lease all of the equipment: the expensive stuff that you need to do: biotechnology work to schools or hacker spaces just for a short period, so that they don’t have to shell out thousands and thousands of dollars.
In order to start hacking biology, the reason why you’d want a an accessible pcr machine is so that more people can be doing more experiments and come up with more ideas. So today, at maker faire, what we’ve been doing is just the last step of our kit that we run with high schoolers, so high schoolers spread this out over six days. They start out with this gfp green fluorescent protein gene from jellyfish and through a bunch of little genetic engineering tricks slip that into bacteria which then glow green after they’ve done all that they get little spots of bacteria that fluoresce under black light. They glow a bright green color.
So what we’re doing here with the kids is giving them the green glowing bacteria and letting them draw pictures, basically embed that the green glowing bugs into agar dishes and then overnight they’ll grow up and form a picture of each kid’s own design. So when we, when we introduce kids to what we’re doing here, it’s kind of like that first that first little thought. So it’s that little kind of inkling that lives in the back of their brain for a while and so once maybe they get introduced to it. Again, they can say, oh well, i did that once at maker faire and uh, and this is what we’re doing with it now.
I wonder where i can take it. So the end goal is to get kids, hobbyists adults and, whatever equipped with the tools to think about biotechnology in a critical and creative way, no longer asking the question: what is genetic engineering, but instead, what can i do with it now? I understand what genetic engineering is and what the tools behind it are. What can i do with it? Absolutely we’re we are trying to plant the seeds for innovation in biotechnology. You .