Revision as of 15:00, 18 October 2016

Welcome to iGEM Aachen 2016

Public Engagement

Everything related to our mission of spreading the thought of iGEM and especially the part of synthetic biology is listed below.

Spreading the News

We wished to get in touch with as many people as possible. Hence, for presenting our work without us being physically there, we developed several ways to spread information about our project and the idea of Synthetic Biology.

Newsletter
From the beginning on, we received a lot of support from various sides and many people were interested in our project. That is why we thought of a way to inform them all at the same time about our progress and developed a monthly newsletter. It was sent to all of our supporters and everybody who opted in. With the newsletter we intended to explain our project to people with and without scientific background and therefore developed a short and an extended version. Writing it helped us reflecting and also preparing for the wiki. We even received suggestions from experts who read about our main challenges in the newsletter.

Flyer Distribution
Our flyer was created in the beginning of our project to give interested supporters a short overview about our idea and to inform people about what we are doing throughout this half year of participating in iGEM.
As iGEM is a great opportunity and experience for everybody - not only university students - and as we could not visit as many schools as we wished, we also sent an adapted version of the flyer with additional information about the competition to about 300 different schools.

Presenting iGEM and Our Project at Schools

figure 1 "FCG" school in Düsseldorf

Our team visited many different schools in and close to Aachen. To give the students a better insight in the field of synthetic biology, we prepared project days in cooperation with the teachers. Our overall goal was to give them an understanding of synthetic biology and microbiology and introduce iGEM to them.

We gave a presentation about synthetic biology, our project and the iGEM competition in general and afterwards gave a safety instruction and performed some experiments with them. During the visits, we were happy to answer all of their upcoming questions as they got more and more in touch with synthetic biology, our project and iGEM.

Since we visited different grades with students of different ages, we adapted every presentation and each experiment to the particular school and their demands. After the experiments and the dialogue with the students we spend some time with the teachers to reflect on our visit. While talking to them we discovered the lack of possibilities for them to perform biological experiments in schools. To meet those needs, we created a collection of easy to understand experiments that do not require any specific equipment.

figure 2: Two team members at "St.Ursula" school, Monschau

Book of experiments (To download the pdf-file, please click here)

Monschau
First, we visited a girl’s school in Monschau on 2 days. During the first one, we talked to several teachers to plan and prepare our visit. We benefit from the teacher’s hints about which topics might be interesting for the students. It was a great pedagogical experience for us, as we had to think of a way how to explain the biological topics to students who do not have a huge biological knowledge.
We thought a lot about it and in the end, it was a great success. We could evoke curiosity and the girls asked a lot of questions about Synthetic Biology and iGEM.

Aachen
Moreover, we visited the St. Ursula Gymnasium in Aachen and presented our work to students who were learned more details about biology in school. We planned the time for presentation again with the teachers and conducted experiments in the end which we adjusted to their level of knowledge. It turned out that many students were interested in choosing a biology-related topic as their study field. This led us to explaining more about our university and talking about different subjects which are interesting for example Synthetic Biology. Later, we had a lively talk with the teachers who gave us some feedback and discussed the role of genetic engineering in Germany.

Düsseldorf
In Düsseldorf, in cooperation with 2 different schools, we organized a whole “Biotech-Day”. It was an interesting and challenging experience for us because there were 89 students for whom we needed to do a lot of preparation. But luckily, with the help of the teachers we managed to plan the day. We did not only present the theoretical background of our project, but also put emphasis on safety aspects related to synthetic biology and the experiments. Hence, we were able to initiate interesting conversations and discussed both, our project idea and the practical work in the lab.
As we prepared some long term experiments, we visited the school again after 2 days and could show the results to them. On that day, they took the chance to ask more specific questions about about Synthetic Biology and our field of study. What looked like an overwhelming organizational challenge turned out to be a great experience with students not much younger than us.

Post Card Project

This year the iGEM Team Düsseldorf started a postcard project. Every participating team had to design their own, with the purpose to increase the knowledge about synthetic biology in the public. We thought it was a great idea, so we participated. These cards have first been distributed amongst all participating teams and then were distributed in different locations around each team’s hometown.

With our topic we wanted to inform people about synthetic biology and genetic engineering and show that they are present in their daily life, in an easily understandable way.
Here, we want to thank once again the iGEM Team Düsseldorf for this great idea and the invitation to participate.

Click on the postcard to see the back.

English translation:
What does synthetic biology even mean?
The term “genetic engineering” is often mentioned in critical media reports and in this context cheese manufacturers more and more advertise with the promise that their products were made without this allegedly dangerous technology. We, as students of this field, would like to give you a better understanding of synthetic biology with the following example: Nowadays, you can find the declaration “without gene technology” on cheese packages. This does not refer to the actual ingredients of the product, but on the production method, so the cheese itself does not differ from “normal” one. Synthetic biology makes it possible to generate products with the help of genetically engineered microorganisms. In contrast, cheese without genetic engineering is produced with dried calf stomachs, which raises the question if this is more desirable.”

Inspiring the Next Generation

“Jugend forscht” is a European science and technology competition for pupils, with more than 10,000 participants annually. The pupils work on a self-chosen idea and present their results at regional levels and later at a national contest to an expert jury. Some winners of this competition were invited to Aachen and visited different scientific places. We organized a presentation and a tour through the laboratory for them. It was an inspiration to see, what an immense interested and advanced knowledge about science they have already had. After the presentation we had a chance to talk about our project and the iGEM competition. It was amazing to be able to enthuse these promising young people further for synthetic biology.