Women in science

Diversity in team composition, majors, and even genders is one of the essential aspects of team formation. The variety of knowledge, communication styles, and perspectives contribute to the success of any project. Although our team consists of just biotechnology members, every member ought to have a distinguished way of thinking, which made our team reach this point despite all of the challenges.

Our team includes consists of 14 girls and 9 boys, and women were included in each subteam. Every member had duties to advance our progress through various skills, such as programming, fundraising, marketing, graphic design, script writing, entrepreneurship, and arts, including drawing and playing piano.

We used all of these combinations to contribute to our achievements and present our project ‘Zekra-ذكرى’ to social media, promotion videos, sponsors, and wiki.

Reaching worldwide societies

As previously stated, we feel that inclusivity is crucial for expanding the scope of research and synthetic biology. We did not stop at the scientific society but tried to share our knowledge with people far from it.

We began with providing our material in different languages to be able to reach several cultures, like translating our promotion video and recording its audio in other languages like Arabic, English, French, German, and Portuguese.

Secondly, we wrote an awareness book, ‘Zekra-ذكرى’, for our community in the local language to be easy for the public to understand, and then spread the book in different languages to other communities with the help of iGEM teams; Insert shapes with the languages inside (Arabic, English, Greek, Indian, Chinese Mandarin, Kiswahili, and French)

Thirdly, we made a comic sketch explaining the concept of synthetic biology to kids and even recorded its voice-over in a kids’ voice to attract them, then we promoted it to our community.

Shaping the information for several Egyptian stereotypes

We reached out to Egyptian society through magazines and different television interviews. As much as possible, we tried to simplify every bit of information to be able to reach the audience.

In these television meetings, we helped people figure out what iGEM competition is and how we start and join it. We explained our project idea and what is Alzheimer's disease in a simple way to reach different mindsets, the current treatment, and how to deal with the patient. Also, we talked about what sustainable development is and how we can apply it, which is one of the goals of iGEM competition.

We didn’t stop with four television interviews, as we made another three newspapers published in the most readable journals found in Egypt.

Finally, we reached out to people through all social media platforms, we made sure to make a series of videos to teach people about synthetic biology, starting from the very basic dry and wet lab techniques.

Moreover, our series of videos included awareness about Alzheimer’s disease using three different types of videos: teasing videos to get audiences' attention, multilingual videos that raise questions inside the viewer's mind to get them more curious.

Finally, the under-one-minute videos included answers from experts/Team members about those questions.

Following numerous Pedagogical styles during our human practices

Focusing on different illustration methods with various learning styles was one of the most important aims during every event we held. Knowing that each person had a distinguished way of conceiving information, we tried to implement all of them during our activities at the events and the workshops we made to prepare the participants for the miniGEM competition.

In illustrating for school students with an average range of 12 years, we followed the kinesthetic approach to teach them about Synbio. Although during the workshops of Synbiotech and the miniGEM events, we carried out various activities to engage readers, visuals, and auditory learners as well. We successfully attained all the learning styles in our reach-out campaigns.

Engaging people with disabilities

As an ultimate goal for us to try to reach as much as people as we could, we searched for a color pallet favorable for color-blind people and decided to choose a pallet that could be distinguished by their eyes. Documented by The NIH, 1 in every 12 men suffers from color blindness of different types [1]. Hence, we have searched for these types and figured out different solutions can make them enjoy the visuals in our wiki, whether they are Red-Green or Blue-Yellow-color blind [2]. Initially, We used the Color Blindness - Protanopia - type view mode on illustrator to see the palette as they see it.

Thus, we completely changed our pallets so that they could discriminate against them. Then, we added a texture for the figures and increased the stroke to highlight the shapes inside each. More importantly, we added an illustrative legend to all of the figures. Collectively all these edits were made so that they can enjoy reading our Wiki without missing the visuals of it.

Here is a glance about how Color-blind people will see our figures