Science is part of our life and we want to bring it closer to the population. So, at StarchStem, in addition to working in the laboratory, we have been doing scientific dissemination in different ways depending on the audience.

Website

We create a website apart from the wiki to be able to communicate and show our project in an easier way to the population. There, we explain what iGEM is, the project and team of this year and also last year. The information is addressed to a public outside the scientific community, so it is written in popular language to be able to reach as many people as possible.

We also include in our website the link of our social media in order to promote interest in the people and if they want to keep up to date on what we are doing.

Social media

We created a profile in 5 social media to expand and publicize the project, so we could reach different audiences with each one. We upload popular science posts, dealing with topics related to synthetic biology and science in general, trying mostly to create a simple content that brings our followers closer to the molecular techniques that we do.

We have different sections for our posts:

Popular science: This is the most rigorous and extensive section where we explain the methods and molecules that we work with. Its purpose is to inform and educate about what we do in the laboratory for our project and bring it to the public.

Explain it to me:This section is complementary to the previous one, but in this we define basic laboratory apparatus and instrumentation that we used. It is a very interesting content for those who have never worked in a laboratory before, but also for scientists to follow our work.

Did you know? In this section we explain curiosities and fun facts to entertain people and capture attention in a more informal way.

Photos in the lab: a picture is worth a thousand words, so showing us in the laboratory brings us closer to the public, shares the team spirit and increases interest about what we are doing, in order to keep the audience engaged.

Presentation: a card with our names and faces allows people to get to know us on a more personal level, in such a way we create a channel of communication and trust.

Latest news: with this content everyone can follow every step of the way of our project and can be aware of what is going on.

• Instagram

  Instagram is currently the most widely used social media and it also has a wide range of audience, from young people to adults and even companies have their own profiles. So this is where we have been most active, with the different types of posts we reach all audiences and we are able to entertain and inform at the same time.

  In addition, we have featured story folders with different parts of our project that we want to make more available and easy to access. In one of these folders we thank our sponsor for their support, so we also help to raise awareness of their brand.

• Twitter

  Twitter has a wide range of audience but there are very different user profiles, so it’s more difficult to get the content right. This way, we have shared our different posts and we have commented on the tweets that seemed similar or related to our content. Twitter threads also make it easier to inform about something specific and to establish conversations with the followers. That can be useful to get more people to understand our project and what synthetic biology is about.

• Facebook

  Facebook is used by adults and companies mainly, the average age is higher than other social media, so we are able to reach more people. The content is almost the same, we share our different posts but in a more formal way.

• LinkedIn

  LinkedIn is used by companies and organizations, through our different posts we try to reach them and make contacts. It is very important for us that the project reaches the citizens in general, but also if we manage to transmit it to the business world, this can lead to collaborations that can benefit both sides.

• TikTok

  TikTok content is purely entertainment and fun videos in the lab to make ourselves known. In general, the audience of this social network are children and teenagers, as they are younger they are less interested in popular science posts with a lot of text. In this way, through dances and videos with nowadays music we bring science and our work in the lab closer to them and create awareness of our project trying to get them interested.

Talks in educational centers

The talks were given in schools and high schools of our city, Malaga, to a range of ages from 8 to 18 years old, so we adapted the content to each level. In these visits the presentations were accompanied with simple experiments, making them more enjoyable and awakening the interest of students who attended them. With children the language is very simple but as they are attentive to what we say they ask a lot of questions, so it is an audience with whom there is a lot of interaction and they learn a lot.

In addition, we gave talks at the University of Malaga in the degrees of Biology and Biochemistry to give visibility in our university environment to iGEM projects and show their basis. Maybe next year more people will know about it and be more interested in creating a new project and raising awareness of the need for such enriching initiatives.

Congresses

SEBBM. (Spanish Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology). We were able to present our project in a conference and then we did a round table with Marc Güel as a guest. The congress members who attended our lecture were researchers and professionals in our sector so the language was scientific and very specific. In this case it was very enriching because our listeners not only learn about our project but also they can give new initiatives and suggestions and we establish an open dialogue.

CEEBI. (State Congress of Students in Bioscience). We exhibited a scientific poster at the congress poster competition about our project and explained what iGEM competition is about. The people were students of our age with similar interests in science so it was easy to capture their interest and achieve a good communication with the aim of bringing iGEM closer to a larger community.

Interviews

We conducted an interview in a regional media, Canal Sur, in which we presented our project with images of us working in the lab and talking about the possibilities of synthetic biology, how important it is and how we can solve problems in our environment using it. This way we bring science to the home of many citizens.

Citizen education

European Researchers Night. We got a stand in one of the main streets in the center of our city, Malaga, to expose our project. The public was very varied, from children to adults, so depending on this we played games and easy experiments or we talked about what our work consisted of and what problems we wanted to solve with it. In thys dynamic and close way the response was very positive and people showed great interest.

Interviews with citizens. We prepared a series of simple questions about synthetic biology, and molecules or devices that we work with to see how people are familiarized with them. We stopped randomly and asked people in the street, this way we get closer to people outside our environment and we can reach out to a wider spectrum of people. It is a different and original way of attracting people's attention, because otherwise they might get bored or, at least, not be so interested.