Communication

For the 99 seconds podcast in collaboration with L’Exploratoire association, we decided to make a podcast accessible to everyone who had scientific knowledge or not. To do so, we use simple words that are easily understandable for everyone by avoiding using technical vocabulary. Moreover, we worked with the association to create images and visuals on the video to help with the understanding. Seeing as L'Exploratoire is a french association with a french-speaking audience, the podcast is in french, but we did include english subtitles to reach a broader audience. We made the decision not to mention synthetic biology, since we were already talking about complexe notions of transforming bacteria, producing electricity and other molecules, we did not want our audience to get lost in all the terms.

Our team thought it could be interesting to popularize science to a younger public. We found an elementary school that was interested in our activities, with two teachers of 4th grade students very interested. This was possible thanks to our social sciences teacher. In order to decide on the best course of action to interest the students while talking about scientific subjects, we presented our project to the teachers and created a lesson plan. We focused on electricity and its sources in living things, such as vegetables and fruits. We decided to come twice in each class.

We wanted the children to participate as much as possible since we didn't want it to be just like any other class. Therefore, we started by asking various questions and trying to see how much knowledge they had about electricity, but the main goal was to get them interested and invested in our activity. Then, we did small science experiments with them, because we wanted to make our lesson as playful as possible so that they remember the messages we were trying to teach them.

During our first time in the class, we asked the children about the different sources of energy they knew about, and talked briefly about green energy without getting too technical. Then, we did experiments with objects such as a lamp, potatoes, copper coins and zinc nail that are represented as blades on the scheme. The goal was for them to see that living things can contain electricity.

At the end of each class, we had created a small scheme for them to complete, as well as a few lines of text that they had to write down to have a written trace of what they had learned. We highlighted a few vocabulary words for them to write down in big, and they got time to ask us any questions they wanted.

It was a great experience to give classes to children, they really liked it. We were very touched to see that they remembered what we taught them when coming back a second time, and that they were sad when we told them that there wouldn't be a third session! This time with such young children showed that its very important to create activities and materials catered to our audience, because having an invested audience means that they will retain the information we give them.

We decided to organize a symposium on synthetic biology and on its applications. The second years at Sup'Biotech were the perfect audience because they already knew concepts of biology, biochemistry, engineering, since its a school specialized in biotechnology. It was easy to teach them what synthetic biology is and its different applications explained by the three invited keynote speakers.

We started by a quick presentation on synthetic biology so that everyone in the room had the basic principles in mind. We used a common comparison with general engineering to explain the different parts of synthetic biology, showing that the standard parts were the DNA (compared to screws), to be assembled in a device, in order to create a system. We also gave examples of the applications of synthetic biology, such as biosensors, production of medical drugs and the production of biomaterials.

Then, we let the invited keynote speakers present. They were Mrs Naomi Kaminsky, Mr François Kepes, Mr Matthieu Da Costa. We chose them because they all work in very different fields, but all using synthetic biology. During their presentations, they presented their work and the techniques they used, and showed the students how large and innovative the field of synthetic biology is. They each got 20 to 25 minutes to present, and then got about 10 minutes of questions each. Some students were even able to ask about doing their future internships in their companies!

We were invited to participate in the BioSynSys symposium as other french iGEM teams, that was organized by the Toulouse Biotechnology Institute and hosted by the Learning Planet Institute. After listening to many incredible presentations about state of the art research on synthetic biology and systems biology, we got the opportunity to present our iGEM project StarchLight. Since we were presenting in front of different professionals in the field, we did not need to adapt our speech: we were able to give detailed information about our device and our work, and we got very technical questions in return.

Our team was invited to participate in the Science Fair at the “Cité des sciences et de l’industrie”, a famous scientific museum in Paris, created to develop scientific curiosity, especially in children. During this event, we planned with the other iGEM teams different activities for the people who came to the Science Fair. We created stands dedicated to a specific audience which was easiest for us to popularize science to different people with different scientific knowledge. The activities were around micro-pipetting, antibiotic resistance, bacterial culture, and DNA extraction. We also hosted a presentation on synthetic biology with a fun quiz at the end to see if the information had been clear enough. We were so glad to see that people from all ages were interested in our talks and our activities, and we were able to go into more detail into synthetic biology and our project with some people that were interested.

Then, for the DNA extraction and microscope observations, the audience was adults so it was a different speech and it was interesting to exchange more on science.

Throughout the creation of StarchLight, we were active on social media in order to create excitement around it. We did multiple posts about SynBio, about iGEM and about our projects, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even TikTok! Depending on the social media, the adapted the content we created, staying more professional on LinkedIn, but having a bit more fun on TikTok for example! Social media was also a great way to keep up to date with the other iGEM projects around the world, create collaboration opportunities, and have people ask questions on our project, iGEM or synthetic biology.