Through our science communication team, we were able to reach out to a multitude of different audiences. We aimed to spread awareness about our project, and synthetic biology, while catering to a variety of needs to make access to this project more accessible. This was crucial, as last year we were unable to do many in-person events so we aimed a majority of this to a widespread audience. Ultimately, through the use of Instagram and our local community, we were able to hold various events and reach a greater audience through these platforms.
We hosted a summer camp in August and taught 4th-8th graders from 5 different schools in our local area. We educated them on synthetic biology and its implications in an effort to raise their interest in this field. We lectured them in the beginning half of the week, introducing them to molecular biology, genetics, and the basics of synthetic biology, and ended the week with allowing them to come up with their own research projects. We also included engaging lab experiments to spark the interest of young students in synthetic biology. Before they started their own mini research project, we introduced them to ours to show them an example and collect feedback on how to explain our idea clearly and concisely. By doing this, it allowed us to not only use the knowledge so many of us have gained through the iGEM process, but also allowed us to impact our local community. Our goal was to become the helping hand to younger kids who are also interested in synthetic biology because so many of us wished we had one too. It was important to us to make ourselves a resource in effort to make synthetic biology more accessible to young kids. (More about our summer camp on the outreach page!)
In regards to our local community, we teamed up with two other highschool teams in our area to create and host an ethics symposium. This was a great success as we had professional research scientists come together in a panel to share their own stories behind conducting ethical research projects, and hearing ours. This not only fostered a healthy and safe space for sharing knowledge, but allowed these researchers to act like mentors and guide us by giving feedback on our projects, but also allowing us to use their tips to better improve ours.
We recognized that our project pertains to many different groups of people beyond our local community, so we designed a survey to push out to the general public in hopes to raise awareness on coral bleaching. We used our instagram to send our survey out to a range of different people on social media in effort to gauge the knowledge the public already has on oxybenzone. Afterwards, we analyzed the data and concluded that the majority of the public is either not informed, or misinformed on the negative effects of oxybenzone. Then, we created a series of instagram posts that not only explain the results, but also reveal the right answer from the survey. This allowed those who took the survey to learn what the right answer for their questions is, which in turn allowed us to use our project to spread awareness on the consequences of oxybenzone.
In addition to this, we reached out to various different professors to gain a better adult audience to communicate our ideas with in effort to gain feedback and make our project better. Our audience ranges from Stanford scientists to environmental researchers. We also discussed each of their own research projects to understand what they did and see how that ties into our project. By doing this we received amazing feedback on how our project comes across to like minded adult professionals. It allowed us to see where our project was lacking, and helped us target those areas allowing us to improve them. We will further discuss how our discussion with professionals impacted our project under our Integrated Human Practices page. We hope that by doing this we were able to create a safe space for learning while humanizing science and making it accessible to an adult audience.