Education and public engagement
For the outreach activities, we attended several conferences to promote our project.
The first talk was with the people who attended the Night of Arts and Sciences; this is an annual event where talks, art, theater, and more; everything related with science was organised! This was a valuable experience, because we had the opportunity to promote our project and talk with people about it and answer their questions.
In addition, we went to the Netherlands Biotechnology Conference, where we had the opportunity to present a poster with the original idea. At that moment, we had no results to show, because we presented just two weeks after the idea was set up. Therefore we presented our idea and things we wanted to achieve. We had the chance to present it in front of experts in biotechnology, who were excited about our idea and gave us feedback. This conference did not give us only feedback to our project, we also had the opportunity to reach sponsors, contacts and meet our fellow iGEM colleagues from other Dutch teams.
After those two activities, we were invited to give a presentation and a workshop at the European Campus Party in Utrecht, The Netherlands. For us, this was a great opportunity because we were able to explain our idea to highly motivated students, professors and people interested in science. We received a lot of feedback from those students and professionals who had different backgrounds and expertise; these feedback was useful to grow up our project.
Besides local conferences, our plan was to achieve more public general audience to talk about our project and make people part of it. After some attempts, the local radio gave us the opportunity in an interview to present our idea to general public. This was challenging due to the fact that this program is oriented to general public audience that might not have so much biologic background. So we were challenged to explain CryptoGErM in a simple, complete and understandable manner. This was a great opportunity to practice how to explain the idea to general public! We realized that we also needed to combine our outreach with the raise of fundings. We organized an action of this purpose; within this auction we gave a presentation of the project.
After the auction, the newspaper from the University of Groningen gave us the opportunity to write and publish an article about our project. This allowed us to present our project in the academic community from the University, from students to professors of all the Institutes and Faculties of the University. They were really enthusiastic about our project! Another magazine that published an article about our project was Lifeline, published by the student association Idun.
Our first video promotion came with the help of Unifocus, a video magazine, that publishes interesting and educational videos about activities carried by students from our University.
After that, we received a phone interview from New Scientist! This magazine is an UK-based weekly magazine that publishes articles related to science and it has an international audience.
Last but not least, we reached the entire country thanks to NOS, the dutch national news agency. NOS made an article and a video about our project. This gave us the opportunity to explain our project to a general and national audience. In addition, Dagblad van het Noorden, a local paper, also gave attention to our project.
For our educational achievements we worked together with one of our main sponsors ScienceLinX. We decided to oriented these activities as a result of our survey, where one of the results was that an important percentage of our survey respondents do not know what bacteria are.
Together with ScienceLinX, we received more than 150 student in our laboratory from different High Schools in the Netherlands, who came for a complete day to spend a day in our University. We started with a lecture in synthetic biology and our project. Followed by BioART in groups, they painted with different colorful bacteria and learnt about synthetic biology in a fun way!
Besides those general activities, we went deeper in our educational achievements; we supervised and advised 9 highly motivated students who came to our laboratory to do experiments for their High School Thesis. Since they were able to spend few days in our laboratory, they could not go through the entire process of bio-encryption. We are proud of our contribution to the formation of these young scientists.
