Team:Danci-K8/Engagement

Danci-K8

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Recruiting the public was done through a few channels: the adult population and the young population. The public community circles did not focus only in our city however outside the city and the district and even nationally.

The young population: the meetings with our team were in the framework of summer camps on Kibbutz Hagoshrim, Masade Village and Kiryat Shmona. At each meeting we tailored our explanations about our project according to the age group with a variety of games planned ahead for the meeting.

Meetings with teenagers: 200 students from 7th grade to 12th grade at our school met with our team and heard about the Synthetic Biology field, and of course our project. By the way, a large part of our students took part in our clip.

We held a convention on Synthetic Biology at our school, and representatives from other Israeli teams participating at the iGEM Giant Jamboree were there as well. At the event we held a debate on the topic of using genetic modification not for saving lives. The audience was the judge. By using the audience we created a loud discussion about our project and about our necessity.

The adult audience: We conducted face to face meetings and conversations accessible to the media, for example – at the Day Center for the Elderly, the Center for the Blind we spoke about our project and the team achievements.

For the rest of the population we raised awareness of our doings through local newspapers, a radio program, television and other online media – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Snapchat and more. Through all these channels we updated the public with great pride about our scientific work.

In order to recruit the general public we brought science to the street via “Science Night” where we put up an explanation booth together with fun activities for the general public. We have to admit that our booth drew a great amount of attention.

At all our interactions with the public we took saliva samples for the need of our research, every participant filled out a questionnaire

By giving samples the public took an active and very important part of our research. From that moment on they were partners. At the same, time community members filled out opinion polls about the use of genetic modification not for life threatening cases. These data were collected with the rest of the findings we presented and were processed together in order to understand public perceptions about the topic.

It is important to note that we raised approximately $100000 towards the project from banks and Israeli businessmen. At every fundraising meeting we gave a presentation about the project's purpose, the fact that we succeeded in raising such a big sum indicates that our public activity was good, because we were able to convince people to donate quite a lot of money.