Team:Moscow City/Communication
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EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION
iGEM Speaking Club
We've decided to make weekly meetings to practice English for science. We discussed iGEM and synthetic biology in general, read many exciting articles and gathered many intelligent and enthusiastic people willing to enhance their level of English. This initiative helped us tell more about iGEM and synthetic biology, meet online with our subscribers, and establish our constantly learning community.
Online Speaking Club IGEM is a unique opportunity for students to :
⠀
— discuss exciting topics from the field of synthetic biology, biochemistry, and genetic engineering
— meet students from different countries, cities
— join the growing IGEM_Moscow-city community
The clubs began to be held in early August 2021. By October had fairly gained popularity and interest among the participants.
The structure of the discussions is as follows:
"Welcome speech" and a brief story about your interests.
Reading paragraphs of an article from reputable American and British scientific journals (we have already discussed "Regaining the Rainbow: A Gene Therapy Approach to Color Blindness," "How Designer DNA Is Changing Medicine" with Scientific American and The Nature).
Identification of problematic grammatical constructions and words
Reflection on the information received and free discussion
A qualified C1-C2 English teacher conducted all IGEM conversational clubs in Business, Law, and Medical English - Anastasia Shirobokova. Anastasia, twice passed TOEFL for 110/120 and SAT Biology for 800/800.
Online Speaking Club IGEM is a unique opportunity for students to :
⠀
— discuss exciting topics from the field of synthetic biology, biochemistry, and genetic engineering
— meet students from different countries, cities
— join the growing IGEM_Moscow-city community
The clubs began to be held in early August 2021. By October had fairly gained popularity and interest among the participants.
The structure of the discussions is as follows:
"Welcome speech" and a brief story about your interests.
Reading paragraphs of an article from reputable American and British scientific journals (we have already discussed "Regaining the Rainbow: A Gene Therapy Approach to Color Blindness," "How Designer DNA Is Changing Medicine" with Scientific American and The Nature).
Identification of problematic grammatical constructions and words
Reflection on the information received and free discussion
A qualified C1-C2 English teacher conducted all IGEM conversational clubs in Business, Law, and Medical English - Anastasia Shirobokova. Anastasia, twice passed TOEFL for 110/120 and SAT Biology for 800/800.
Social Media
We've established three social media pages of our project in Instagram, VK, and Telegram (links). We posted updates and information about our project, exciting facts, and articles about synthetic biology. In addition, we covered a lot of events - offline and online - where our subscribers could learn more about science. Our pages were both in Russian and in English. Thereby we spread helpful information about iGEM and international research in synthetic biology for Russian subscribers, who might haven't known about such a big contest. Also, subscribers from other countries could see how Russian iGEM teams work and collaborate with us.
All in all, our Social media became a good source for public outreach for our project and our platform for science communication, collaborations, educational information, and events.
All in all, our Social media became a good source for public outreach for our project and our platform for science communication, collaborations, educational information, and events.
iGEM Moscow City
online event
online event
In the summer, we held an online event about iGEM and how to start your team even if you are a freshman. We shared our experience with a Russian school, and university students told them about the contest and synthetic biology in general and gave them essential advice. As iGEM is not a very well-known contest in Russia. This meeting was an excellent way to introduce Russian students to this international competition and inspire them to participate next year.
Participating in online and offline events
During the iGEM season, we participated in 6 online and offline events. We gave our lectures on summer practice of MSU bioinformatics and bioengineering students, School of Molecular and Theoretical Biology, Geek Picnic festival, in MIPT university and "Kariera" high school in Moscow. We also presented our project to the iGEM /judging committee/. Our public talks covered very different audiences; therefore, many people got acquainted with synthetic biology and our project.
SnapGene manual
SnapGene became our partner, and we got a free license for their software. It is pretty helpful for planning biological experiments, so we've decided to create a simple and understandable manual for those who start working with SnapGene. This small guidebook will be beneficial for future iGEMers in Russia and the whole world.
Mass media engagement
We presented our project on various Russian resources - N+1, Biomolecule, Career in science by Vika Korzhova, etc. We gave a small pitch of our project and links to all our social media pages. Broad audiences - from teenagers to adults - got acquainted with iGEM, synthetic biology, and the main topic of our project. We also engaged with different audiences through meme media channels - Synchronized chaos, biochemical memes, and iGEM Memes. We suggest that that's also a good and fun way to learn something new - especially about iGEM.
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