ENS students give a biology lesson to primary and secondary school pupils

On January 9, Biology Master's students found themselves in class, no surprise there, except that this time, it was their turn to teach! On the program: antibiotics for elementary school students, microbiota for high school students and genome for college students. This project, called 'Forum biosciences', is part of the course 'Biosciences and society' and is intended to help students be aware of science issues in society. The "exchange day" gave the ENS students the opportunity to work on a long-term group project and to experience how to promote science to a larger public. The fifth grade pupils went on a day trip; direction: the Monod campus of the ENS de Lyon, and more precisely, they visited a training room used for practical work in the Biology Department. The goal: to discover the mechanisms of resistance to antibiotics. Putting themselves in the shoes of the researchers (wearing lab coats), they found the effective antibiotic against «golden staph» (Staphylococcus aureus) through practical and fun activities: scale models, experiments in the laboratory, observations on microscopic preparations. This day also helped raise awareness amongst this young audience about public health problems resulting from failure to comply with antibiotic prescriptions.