Information booth in Heidelberg's pedestrian zone

Considering how important science has become in our daily lives, e.g. regarding climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided that a human practices project focusing on the general population was necessary. But to plan an educational activity with the highest achievable level of inclusivity (by including every human being) seemed like an extraordinarily difficult task.

With the help of Philipp Schrögel, a science communication expert, we developed the plan to open an information booth in Heidelberg's pedestrian zone. The idea was to show presence and intrigue passersby to find out more about synthetic biology and by that, making it more accessible and inclusive for everyone.

On the weekend of the 20^th and 21^st of August, we opened our information booth with equipment borrowed from the general students committee (Studierendenrat Heidelberg). Our repertoire of activities consisted of quiz questions hanging all around our pavilion with the answers on the back, colouring pages to paint at the booth or at home, a photo backdrop with the headline “scientist of the year”, and lab coats in adult and child size, as well as props from the laboratory like an Erlenmeyer flask to pose.

**Figure 1: Visitors and team members having fun at the booth.** From left to right: team picture of the iGEM Heidelberg members at the “Scientist of the year” (in German: *“Wissenschaftler des Jahres”*) photocall; little kid with a scientific-themed coloring page; Franziska Lam explaining the experiment to an interested family; some more posing with our photo backdrop.

Our goal was for people to feel like scientists themselves after doing the main activity of our booth: a DNA experiment. The objective of the experiment was to render the DNA of a banana visible in just a couple of minutes. The instructions of the experiment were provided to us by the EMBL TeachingBASE, with which we designed our own manual optimised for our target group.
After final evaluation of our project, we concluded that we succeeded in reaching everyone with our booth. We managed to attract a diverse group of people. People from Colombia over Spain to India stopped by our booth and were interested in our activities. People from all age-groups experimented with us. Sometimes adults were even more excited about doing an experiment than the children, since they rarely get the chance. The children were very excited about taking home their own extracted banana DNA in a centrifuge tube. During the two days our informational booth was open, around 50 people conducted our experiment.

**Figure 2: Visitors carrying out our experiment.** Children, teenagers and adults visited our booth and were interested in doing its main attraction: a banana DNA extraction, an easy and quick experiment for them to carry out. In the middle picture, Johann Blakytny, a team member, is explaining the steps to two excited listeners.

Naturally, people working or studying in the field of STEM were more attracted to our booth, but we also reached many people that were not affiliated with the field, and who sometimes were even a little sceptical about synthetic biology. Most people were very supportive and encouraged us to conduct more activities similar to this one.

After the weekend, we reviewed the feedback we received and thought of improvements to give to our or any iGEM Team wanting to open an information booth in the future.
Having different activities is essential to attract a wide variety of people, especially activities targeted at different age groups. We could have targeted teenagers more strongly by providing information about study programs and training in the field of STEM in Heidelberg and the surrounding towns. Since we also had people working in STEM stop by, we could have provided some more information about our project on a more advanced level.
After all, only slight improvements would be needed and we are truly satisfied with what we have accomplished at our information booth and think that it is a great way for the public to come into contact with science.