Working with society as one of the important and key moments during the iGEM competition. This is an indicator of how our project affects society, what contribution it can bring.

Our team is proud of the events held, where a large mass of people were involved. Through these events, we were able to raise awareness of the problem among the local population and contribute to the improvement of our city and country!

Firstly, we divided our target audience into different groups based on the age of our listeners: kindergarten, elementary school, high school, teachers and adults. We have developed our individual approach to each group of people, talking about the basics of synthetic biology, its possibilities, as well as the problem of plastic pollution.

We visited 3 different kindergartens, namely "Zhasulan", "Nursat”, and "Anelya" located in our hometwon Shymkent. To achieve our goal, we designed a colouring book with drawing of beneficial bacteria and their usage in fighting plastic pollution. After providing basic information about microorganisms, we gave a sightly detailed task to enhance their understanding further. We explained them the building block of life – DNA – and how it could be used in synthetic biology. Children were tasked to create their own DNA models from reusable clay. This way they had both an informative and engaging introduction to the existing issue & its possible solutions.

Since both middle and high students have gained fundamental knowledge of STEM subjects, we have developed a more advanced approach to introduce the world of SynBio. Having explained the core concepts of standard molecular biology techniques and their application in synthetic biology, we demonstrated how we can create a system that deals with plastic degradation. Our presentation included infromation about PET, Idionella sakeinsis, PETases and MHETases, and Pseudomonas Putida.

With this organization, we held two joint clean-ups.

The first one took place on August 21 and about 80 people participated in it. We cleaned up on the bank of the Kochkar-Ata River and collected city garbage. The clean-up was very fun, and the atmosphere with the charged young guys motivated us to keep up and fill the bags with garbage.

We spent the next clean-up day before going to a plastic recycling plant in the countryside next to the Sairam-Su River. The peculiarity of this clean-up was that we collected plastic, namely plastic bottles (PET) separately, so that we could then hand it over for recycling.

This was the first clean-up of this kind, before the garbage was not sorted. Due to transport restrictions, we were able to take a maximum of 28 volunteers, and despite the small number of volunteers, we collected 52 giant garbage bags, of which 21 were with plastic.

Honestly, we did not expect to see so much garbage in the countryside, but the landscapes are so fabulous.

However we are glad that together with “New Wave” we have made our planet at least a little cleaner!

Modern life is already impossible to imagine without the Internet. And according to the latest data from Hootsuite, there were 4.62 billion social media users worldwide in January 2022. And the average time person spends on social networks per day is 2 hours and 24 minutes.

That is why we pay special attention to the promotion of our project in the virtual world, namely in the Instagram account.

In the modern world, many teenagers love to read comics. But why are they so popular among young people?

Comics are easy to read, because instead of paragraphs there is a bright colorful picture and a minimum amount of text. After all, it is much more convenient and interesting for them to perceive information in the form of illustrations. It is for these reasons, in order to arouse interest in our project among teenagers, our team has created a small comic with an interesting "superhero" plot!

“BACTERIAL ESCAPE” SCRATCH GAME

To explain the main idea of our project to children, our team has created a very simple but absorbing game on the platform "Scratch".

When we were thinking about activities for kindergartens, during our work with the computer, the lights unexpectedly turned off and the Internet stopped working. And, as usual, a dinosaur with cacti appeared on Google. We were so inspired by this dinosaur that we decided to create a platform that describes our whole project in game form.