Team:Dundee/Engagement

Public Engagement

Engagement

Glasgow Science Centre

We spent the afternoon at Glasgow Science Centre educating children on healthy guts and how their health affected their bowels. While the children were making ‘healthy poo’, we had time to speak to the parents about our project and get their thoughts on what we were doing. To aid this, we prepared two posters to present; one detailed how our project would work; and the other was based on campylobacter and how to reduce the risk of infection. The two posters had different designs, one was more text based with biological terms and images, and the other was an infographic consisting of images and figures. The feedback we received said the infographic was easier to understand; therefore we are going to design our final poster in the style of an infographic to aid understanding of our project and to simplify the communication of our results. We received great feedback from the kids and Science Centre staff who all enjoyed our activities and learned from our exhibit.

“I thought your activity was fantastic, really fun and interactive. The kids I saw having a go were loving it!” – Emma Woodham, Science Learning Coordinator at Glasgow Science Centre

Edinburgh Debate

We teamed up with the undergraduate team from Edinburgh to organise a debate regarding GMOs to help us better understand perceptions from non-scientists and what they main points are for arguing for and against the use of GMOs. We enrolled the University of Dundee and Edinburgh debating unions to present and chair the debate, which was a massive success and contributed to our understanding of the main opposition to GMOs in the public eye.

The debate leaned heavily towards GM crops, as it does in Scotland, and focused on the profit that could be made by large companies such as Monsanto who develop GM seeds that outperform their natural siblings. There is a fear that these companies would hold their seeds ransom for an extremely high price, with farmers obliged to pay due to their undoubted benefits. This was countered with the notion that whilst companies such as Monsanto make a profit, it is not comparable to the saving of millions of lives due to these improved agrichemicals producing better yields, and in harsher environments.