The most important part for successful development of the society is education. By developing educational tools, writing a childrens’ book, visiting schools, and having meaningful discussions with the public and politicians, our team managed to target five groups of people with our outreach.
Figure. Mind map illustration of our five target groups: Children, high school students, university students, general public, and politicians
LEGO game
One of our main goals within education has been to make our school visits as interactive and fun as possible. We decided to do this by letting children do what they like the most - play games. To make it easier for both teachers and us to explain basic principles of synthetic biology in an interesting and simple way, we created a LEGO game where students are supposed to modify organisms by making their own plasmids with the help of lego bricks.
After using LEGO during our workshop we asked students to anonymously give us feedback and to tell us whether the game made it easier to understand the concept of plasmids and how to design them. 27 students answered our poll and 23 students answered that LEGO game made it easier to understand and made the whole workshop much more interactive.
Carousel. Pictures of students building plasmids with LEGO
Children's book
Vitamins are highly important to keep the body working properly. Our aim is to raise awareness about vitamins among children and to make them understand why vitamins are so important. One of the easiest ways to reach out to children is by illustrating and telling them a story. That is why we have written a children’s book, named “Stories from Albert’s market”. In this book, the function that all vitamins have in our body and their sources are described in a simple and interesting way to make sure that even the youngest one can understand it. The book was translated to Swedish and they were distributed around childcare centers, hospitals and school libraries in Stockholm.
Level Up Collab
Together with iGEM ULaval, iGEM Patras and iGEM Thessaloniki, we were a part of the Level Up collaboration - a science communication collaboration in synthetic biology. Our main goal with this collaboration was to communicate synthetic biology and explain to different audiences how it can be used to create a more sustainable society. By creating four pamphlets that explain the concept of synthetic biology at four different levels of complexity we were able to target four groups of people. For more information visit the Collaboration page.
To target general public and STEM students, we organized an iGEM day at three different university campuses in Stockholm on September 13th, where we distributed 600 pamphlets. During the distribution we had the opportunity to have a dialogue with students about synthetic biology and its possibilities, but also talk about pernicious anaemia and our project BiG-IF.
To target children, high-school students and the general public once again we distributed pamphlets during European researchers' night (ForskarFredag). We also distributed pamphlets during our high-school visit and in total, around 700 pamphlets were distributed in Stockholm.
Rays visit
In late June, our human practices team organized a workshop about synthetic biology for high-school students in a summer science school named Rays. The workshop started with us introducing iGEM and synthetic biology by talking about common techniques we use everyday in our lab. But since we believe that the best way of learning synthetic biology is by practicing, we let the students do something hands-on.
First thing we did was to show them how to use a micropipette. We had a pipette-school where all students had to pipette 1000µL of water into a beaker and try to get as close as possible to 1g when weighed.
After the pipette-school it was time to start with the main assignment. To let them get a taste of how it is to work with synthetic biology, they got the opportunity to practice PCR. All students got different BioBrick samples with different lengths to do a PCR on. The PCR samples were loaded on a gel by us and the day after students got assignment to interpret the results.
Figure. Collection of three feedbacks from the Rays visit
Carousel. Pictures of students preparing PCR samples
High school
We also visited 35 students studying their third year science program in Tullinge Gymnasium, a high school in Stockholm. After getting feedback from students participating in Rays, we changed our workshop style according to their opinions for the next school visit. According to the students, the workshop could be improved by going into more details when explaining different techniques. We decided to therefore have a longer presentation with first explaining basics of biotechnology and synthetic biology, followed by more detailed explanation by going through different steps in our project. During the presentation we also let students answer questions to make it more interactive.
This time, instead of having lab work with students, after the presentation we decided to let them play with the LEGO game we developed and that way they got to learn more about plasmids and how to design these.
At the end we asked them to fill out an anonymous survey where we asked whether or not the workshop was informative and if the LEGO game made it easier to understand the concept of plasmids.
Figure. Pie charts showing that 88.9% of the participants found the workshorp informative and 85.2% that the lego game made it easier to understand the concept of plasmids
Carousel. Our HP team visiting Tullinge Gymnasium
ForskarFredag
Since our school visits were aimed at teenagers already studying science, in order to also meet students from other fields we decided to be part of the exhibition at ForskarFredag. ForskarFredag is part of European Researchers’ Night, a large festival taking place all over Europe which aims to bring science and researchers closer to the public, especially children.
During ForskarFredag we got the opportunity to talk with a lot of different students, but also teachers and other researchers, about synthetic biology and our project. We were explaining how microorganisms and gene technology can be used to solve problems society is facing, through, our project and technologies we used, among other things. Unfortunately we got a more meaningful dialogue and interaction with adults than students and we also realized that there is hardly any interest for synthetic biology among students we met, mostly because their knowledge is weak, based on dry school theory. Therefore we would like to, in the future, contact the Swedish National Agency for Education and discuss the possibilities of making education in STEM subjects more interactive, and thus also hopefully increase the interest for STEM among students.
Carousel. iGEM Stockholm during European Researchers’ Night in Stockholm
Politicians
After our visit to Almedalen, a democratic meeting place and a political event in Sweden organized by the parliamentary political parties, we got to the conclusion that the knowledge about GMOs and synthetic biology is very low among politicians. Since they have a great amount of power, we decided that it would be necessary to include them as well in our outreach. Reaching out to them was a bit difficult but we sent informative emails to different politicians. We also asked some that have experience being in parliament for an interview to establish a dialogue and discussion, but unfortunately the meeting couldn’t take place.
We also wanted to investigate how the interaction between politicians and experts within gene technology works in Sweden. Therefore we interviewed the Swedish Gene Technology Advisory Board, which works with ethical issues and with spreading information about new technologies and discoveries within gene technology among the general public and politicians. During the interview we learned that the Swedish Gene Technology Advisory Board meets politicians nine times a year to discuss new developments and spread knowledge. There are also other councils such as The Swedish National Council on Medical Ethics (SMER)that have regular meetings with parliamentary political parties to spread knowledge and give advice regarding current and new regulations.