Education & Public Engagement
Our team had the opportunity to participate in a science summer school program for middle school students in 7th-8th grade. During one week at the beginning of the summer, three teammates from our human practice group acted as lab mentors, helping the kids perform fun experiments in order to extract DNA from kiwis. This experiment was called “Discovering Chemistry” and proved to be liked by the students. The weeks leading up to the summer school, the experiment was planned and put together with one of the senior lecturers at the university, Sofie Nyström, to whom we are very thankful.
After the experiments had been completed, we had the opportunity to talk about our project for this year, iGEM, and teach the young students further about DNA, and what can be done with this marvelous molecule. The conversations and lectures we had with the students resulted in a lot of fun and interesting discussions. At summer school this year, we were happy to have been able to reach out to the younger students. Hopefully, some of them were inspired to become our future scientists!
Sports are a huge part of millions of peoples lives. An estimated 69 million people worldwide are currently suffering with an mTBI, contracted through sports or accidents that have happened in their daily lives [1]. People walking around with undiagnosed concussions are one of the biggest issues, so much so, that it has been named ‘the silent pandemic’. Many sports professionals are aware of the issues that come with repeated concussions, but far more people ,such as casual practitioners, have either never heard of this problem, or do just simply not know how serious concussions really are. We wanted to raise awareness of this concern, explaining our project, and why diagnosing concussions, thus getting the right treatment, is highly necessary to prevent potential complications. Complications meaning repeated head injuries that raise the risk of more serious neurological trauma. Our plan was to open up a stand in down town Linköping where we handed out pamphlets, and the public would ask us questions to discuss our project, iGEM, and head trauma.
We used this opportunity to not only promote practicing safe sports, but also discussed an element of synthetic biology and how it is used. Today, it is not uncommon for people to have a prejudice about synthetic biology because of the grand headlines floating around, giving it a bad light. Having a multidisciplinary team, all having been in close contact with synthetic biology, we wanted to see how the general public viewed that same topic.
To make the experience more interactive, we prepared a quiz for them to participate in. The quiz contained questions about our project, synthetic biology, and iGEM.
Below is the quiz, and the result we got from our event. The pamphlet that was distributed was written in Swedish, but multilingual translations were offered on the spot for international students, and individuals that were interested. We also informed the people that if they had further questions, we were available on social media and by email.
We made a school visit to the senior high school Birgittaskolan in Linköping.
During the visit we presented our project and talked about iGEM. We also tried to inspire the students to consider going into academia by talking and answering questions about university. In addition to the presentation, we prepared a small lab that was performed to make the presentation more visual and engaging. The students we were invited to talk to were of varying ages, between just starting senior high school and those close to entering university. The response from students and teachers was positive, and both of our team members, Alexander and Sofia, who visited the school had a great time.
A big thank you to Birgittaskolan for inviting us to come and visit you! We look forward to keeping contact with you in the future.