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This year our goal was to collaborate not only with teams within Australia but also around the world. Throughout the year we collaborated with a number of different teams on a variety of initiatives including books, podcasts and comics. Our efforts spanned across the globe from Crete to France and we are extremely grateful to all the teams who reached out and contributed to our project. Through these efforts we were pushed to think outside the box about science communication as well as troubleshooting drawbacks in other teams’ experimental frameworks.
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Our team collaborated with iGEM Tec Chihuahua to contribute to their Comic Book initiative. This book was a
collection of comics sent from iGEM teams all around the world about their projects. We too created a comic
based on our project mascots ‘Betty Bottle’ and ‘Walter Wheat’. Through this collaboration we were able to
explore our project through a creative lens.
View the comic and read more here.
We collaborated with iGEM KU Leuven on their lead podcast project, which was an introduction to how scientists
solve problems and it was an opportunity for us to learn the stories of successful scientists. We chose to
introduce Peter Charles Doherty, who is an Australian immunologist and Nobel laureate (Physiology or Medicine in 1996).
We learnt about the hardships he faced and gained a new appreciation for scientists across the field.
Listen to the podcast and read more here.
In October we launched our magazine initiative and collaborated with iGEM William and Mary, iGEM Groningen, iGEM IONIS and iGEM Crete to publish a
compilation of scientific articles for the general public.
Read the magazine and read more here.
We collaborated with the McGill, Queen's, Cornell and Costa Rica iGEM teams in their joint Bacteria Book initiative where we provided information on a bacterium of interest.
Read more here.
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We organised a meetup with other iGEM teams in Australia, The Kings School and University of Newcastle, to discuss our projects and offer advice.
Through this online meeting we were able to learn about their project aims and goals as well as build a meaningful connection with the team members.
Some of the discussion points included, but were not limited to, the inspiration behind our respective projects, our goals for the duration of the
competition, any obstacles encountered thus far, funding opportunities as well as potential collaborations later in the year.
We coordinated and held a second virtual meetup with the iGEM team from Kings School and the team from iGEM USYD. We updated each other on our
projects and discussed ways in which they had deviated from the aims and goals we discussed at the start of the year. It was interesting to
compare our projects and outcomes, especially with the Kings School as they are a high school team. We were able to talk about shortcomings in
our experiments and other ventures and how we each overcame them in our own way. It was a great way to end our collaborative journey as
Australian teams.
Discord group chat was established between the wiki teams to share information and distribute assets. Information includes bug issues,
writing custom scripts, wiki layout and how to produce media for the wiki (Figure1 and Figure2). Assets distributed were image traced
svgs of sponsors and social media icons . It also included reposting of iGEM slack competition-wiki threads that were relevant to the
wiki teams (Figure3). Virtual meetings were also held to discuss wiki challenges (Figure4).
28th September, another meetup. Joined by Mark Hong, from UNSW, from his group's wiki team. Kiran learned that the flask app is probably the
most optimal way to design the wiki for now, given the limited time we had to finish designing (less than 2 weeks). Kobe had problems with the
.gitlab-ci.yml file on the wiki to deploy the website, as he had gotten rid of the original flask app, and needed a new template. storing everything
in a public folder didn't fix the problem. Kiran’s problem was getting the animated json to load. He decided to then include the animation as
the homepage banner, rather than a preloader splash screen animation. Mark told them that most of his wiki would be accordion-style paragraphs
and subheadings, with the coding work split up amongst the members. Some of the design was done on canva as well, but that was only advisable
for early stages of the project. After the meeting Kiran made the decision to stick with flask app coding to complete the wiki, and also
didn’t delete the bootstrap bundle. 2nd October, the meeting was created to update each other on wiki progress. USYD’s and King’s school’s websites
were steadily progressing, after receiving advice from UNSW, as well as receiving SVGs for social media icons. In talks about design, Mark advised
on the consistency of layouts and design throughout the website for a smoother user experience. Kiran had adopted UNSW’s strategy of collapsing large
text areas and sections into accordion element containers, which worked well. Kobe’s work on the King’s school website was going well after omitting
gitlab’s default addons, to allow for more robust web design. The design was reviewed positively by both Mark and Kiran.
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