Introduction

     Knowing that education events are sometimes tedious, we wanted to have an interesting and easy-to-understand means of education to encourage more people into the gates of synthetic biology. Since we wanted to target normal people this time, we needed to make the show humorous while not losing focus on synthetic biology and our project.

     After many rehearsals, we finally produced three viable talk shows that were both enjoyable and knowledgeable. Now, common people without any background in synthetic biology can finally experience genetic technology without having to go through heavy textbooks first.

Talk Show 1.0

    We talked about what synthetic biology is, what the iGEM competition is about, and what are the jobs in our team. Since this is the first show, we wanted to let people know "who we are" and "what we are doing" first. About twenty people, mostly college students, participated in this show. We received an average of 7.3 points out of ten when we asked how much they enjoyed the show and 7.6 points when we asked if they thought they understood the idea of iGEM and synthetic biology after this show. We viewed this as a decent start and discussed how we could improve in the future.

Talk Show 2.0

    This time, we talked about astronauts' mental and physical problems in space and how we can utilize synthetic biology to help them. Moreover, since our project was almost complete then, we explained more about how we planned to engineer E. coli. There were not a lot of participants in Talk Show 2.0. However, another chance emerged while we were attending the TCUS (Taiwan Comprehensive University System) entrepreneurship competition.

Talk Show 3.0

    During the TCUS entrepreneurship competition, CCU kindly invited us to perform in their school since none of them had ever heard of a talk show about synthetic biology. Since our main audiences were other iGEMers and future iGEMers, this time, instead of introducing synthetic biology and the iGEM competition, we focused more on promoting our ideas while making the show hilarious to ramp up the enthusiasm of the audience. This final show was a huge success! We utilized the skills and experience gained from the previous two shows and performed the best show ever! We got an average of 8.48 points out of ten when we asked them to rate how much they liked the show.

    Moreover, for those who missed the show, we have uploaded recordings of our shows on youtube, allowing more people to be engaged.

❮ ❯

Conclusion

    Now, we are glad to announce that we have successfully created a knowledgeable show that is enjoyable for both students with synthetic biology backgrounds and the general public.