Education

Social Media

We have been active on our social media channels, especially Instagram and Facebook, but also LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok. We have made informational posts to Instagram and Facebook about our project and the problem we aim to solve. Our posts have also been about synthetic biology, iGEM and inclusivity. In our TikTok we have focused more on the interesting and fun side of science, posting material from the lab and our office spaces, hoping to spark some interest in the younger audience.

We think that it is important to try to break the stereotypes that surround science and may prevent some young and brilliant minds from entering the scientific community. By bringing out our own personalities we hope to showcase that one doesn't need to be any special to work in science. By posting about the successes and failures, but also the everyday life outside the lab we have tried to promote that kind of attitude and to show that you don't need anything but a curious mind to do science. With the combination of the educational and also more fun content we hope to reach a wide audience of different groups and make science accessible to as many people as possible.

Heureka

Aalto-Helsinki team has been happy to collaborate with Heureka for many years now. Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre brings technology and science to the public in different engaging and interactive exhibitions. In 2022, our team continued our collaboration by organising together with Aboa team workshops at the Heureka venue. Our goal was to show how lab work is done in research, hence inspire people to become more interested in science, especially in synthetic biology. However, it was important to adjust the lab experiments so that they were safe and interesting for different age groups. Creating interactive workshops were an important aspect for us, since through those workshops we were able to have a two-way dialogue with new communities.

Together with team Aboa from Turku, we established two workshops for one day. Our goal was to design the workshops to be interesting and engaging for everyone regardless of their age and experience and also to reflect the work we do in the lab on a daily basis, bringing the science and laboratory work closer to the general public, especially the children and youth. By doing this we hope to inspire the next generation of future scientists to stay curious and form an interest towards science.

Our workshops consisted of two experiments conducted in a laboratory environment. In one of the workshops the visitors tried to arrange different everyday food substances and liquids based on acidity first by guessing and after that they got to test them with ph-paper to see if their hypothesis was correct. The idea was to challenge the participants into critical thinking and to showcase that even the most mundane things can have unexpected and counterintuitive properties.

In the other workshop we demonstrated a mini centrifuge made out of cardboard and string. By pulling the strings with the right tempo the cardboard disc reached a really high rotational speed, just like a real centrifuge. After that the visitors got to practice pipetting by transferring droplets of food colour onto the disc and making art by spinning the disc so that the colours spread and mixed into each other due to the centrifugal force. For parents and other slightly older participants we explained how this same principle can be used in developing countries to centrifuge blood samples to look for diseases in a very accessible and cheap way.

Writing

Blog Posts

Our team was active with writing about our project. In our biweekly blog we were able to dive deeper into the different aspects of our project. We have written about the theory behind the project, the steps we have taken during the summer and all the exciting collaborative events we have been able to take part in during our iGEM journey shedding light on the different academic and social aspects of the project. We wanted to write our blog to have a platform where we could dive deeper into our project without the limitation of characters. This way we were able to show our enthusiasm and excitement about our project and the field of biosciences. We find it important to show people our genuine interest in what we do and we hope to give insight to people interested in science what working in this field could mean.
You can find the blog posts here.

Newsletter

Without all the people helping us with the project we wouldn't have been able to accomplish nearly as much. That is why we have published a monthly newsletter directly to the professionals helping us on our journey, to keep them updated on our progress. There we have talked about our successes and challenges during our summer, giving more detailed information about our lab experiments.

Podcast

We continued a podcast launched by the 2021 Aalto-Helsinki team. In our podcast episodes we aimed to share the knowledge about iGEM, synthetic biology and how a student-led research project can work. We had discussions with our team leaders about leading a project and team members about our project in general. We also met last year's leader Sally Chestnut and interviewed her experience and got good tips from her for the rest of our year. Our podcast can be found here.

Presentations

Presentation at the Science Basement

Together with the Aboa team, we presented our project in Science basement, which is a Helsinki-based scientific community that offers a discussion and networking platform for early career scientists across all disciplines. In our 30-minute presentation, we first introduced the overall sub-field of synthetic biology before delving into each of our projects as an application example: Therapeutics for us, and Agriculture for the Aboa team. The presentation was followed by a Q&A session from fellow scientists eager to learn about the techniques we used in-lab and what markets our projects could tap into.

Entrepreneurship Presentation at Slush

We will be pitching our project at a side event of Slush Helsinki at the end of November to showcase innovative student projects. Slush is the world's leading startup event, where start-ups come together with investors and other founders. The conference is a perfect mix of inspirational discussions, meetings, pitches and possibilities to form connections. Our team will present our project, Qblock, in the Slush side-event, Y Science. For the pitch competition, we present our project in the light of how synthetic biology products can become a future business venture. After the pitch, the jury will be able to ask questions about our project.

International Biology Olympiad

The International Biology Olympiad is an international biology competition for high school students. The 10 most motivated students in Finland are chosen for a year-long prep course for the competition, before four of them are chosen to participate in the competition. In the beginning of August they had a training week in Aalto University's premises. We introduced them briefly to the world of synthetic biology and our project, giving them insight to what studying biosciences on a higher level could mean. The students were also able to ask us questions about our studies and how the transition from high school to university works.

Our aim was to inspire and encourage the students to continue to pursue a career in science, giving them an opportunity to ask questions about our studies. In our presentation we gave them peaks into the more advanced concepts of our project, explaining in more detail the reasons behind our decisions. We had great discussions with the students and found new ways to explain our project.

University course presentations

We have been presenting our project and iGEM to university level students through short presentations during relevant courses. During the spring we presented our project to a synthetic biology course. In the autumn we have been presenting our work to the first year students of different master programs at the University of Helsinki. Through these presentations we hope to get more applications for the next year's team.