BioPlaytime is a blog article written by Christina Agapakis that outlines an afternoon exploring engineering E. coli with genes that produce multicolor pigments, painted with living cells, and designed our own mini-IGEM projects (Agapakis, 2012).
You can read the article and link into IGEM International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM).
Through IGEM, student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Working at their own schools over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells. The competition includes a high school devision and a entrepreneurship division.
2012s IGEM is over but you can still visit the project for information and resources and you might consider combining the competition with an arts project for IGEM 2013 – check out the teacher’s workshops.