Despite the pandemic, we were able to overcome the barriers and collaborated with over 10 iGEM teams across the world. Not just simply fulfilling one of the medal criteria, we have learned a lot and ended up forming friendships with members from other iGEM teams.
iGEM Patras created a comic and wanted to translate it into many languages. They contacted us to see whether we were interested in helping them. We gladly accepted the task and translated their comic into Chinese. We had the chance to read their comic before it was released, the comic was based on their project topic this year. It was fun doing the translation! Other than that, we were also involved in their SDGs video collaboration where we briefly described our SDGs goal this year. They were the first team we had collaborated with!
Our team designed two games: Depression story game and another card game called ‘Depressured’. The interactive story game provided players to experience a depressed person’s daily life moments. We hope this game could raise mental health awareness and reduce the stigmas revolving around it. While the card game was a triple collaboration with iGEM SDU Denmark, we designed a series of Q&A about depression to help people understand depression better.
TAS_Taipei was one of the pioneer teams in introducing SDGs to iGEM. This year, they also paid attention to this section and held an iGEMxSDGs Impact Challenge and Conference. They invited our team to join their event in September 2021, which we gladly accepted. We were first required to fill in a form and list our goals and the task we wanted to assign to other teams. During the event, we introduced our project and which SDG we are targeting. We also took the task from Calgary, which is to help them find rare earth metal fun facts. As for us, we asked other teams to fill out the market survey we did so we could have a better understanding of the current market condition. We learned the importance of aligning our project with SDGs through this conference!
Our team met SDU Denmark through CCU_Taiwan. SDU and our team were both involved in designing solutions for mental health issues, which is the main reason we contacted them in the first place for a potential partnership. We soon arranged our first online meetup and exchanged our ideas with each other. The atmosphere was great and fun as we kept up a dynamic conversation, trying to understand each others’ solutions. Although our topics were similar, the solutions we offered were utterly different. We believe this provided insights for each other from another perspective, especially in business plans. Our teams developed a card game for mental, educational purposes. Besides, we also collaborated on the dry lab level and had discussions about enzyme kinetics.
CCU_Taiwan is one of our partner teams for this year. We met through the Taiwan iGEM online conference and decided to collaborate. Many discussions were involved among us in various aspects, such as education, business model, IHP, etc. We held the iASK Symposium, dedicated to iGEMers in understanding the judging session and regulations. Besides, we also met up and visited Trade Wind Biotech together in Yilan County. It was a memorable experience for us as we discussed each of our projects and planned for possible future collaborations, like business models. We assisted and gave each other a lot of feedback regarding the business models。
We held a #DeStressChallenge together in August 2021 along with iGEM Costa Rica. At first, we were introduced to each other by iGEM Costa Rica. We had in mind to challenge iGEM teams to show how they de-stress on Instagram posts. So we held a #DeStressChallenge together in August 2021 along with iGEM Costa Rica. People were free to share their favorite de-stress activities. The reason is we know that iGEMers are definitely in the high-stress group, which is why we held this event to remind us to take care of ourselves too because that is equally as important.
We held a #DeStressChallenge together in August 2021 along with iGEM Vienna. iGEM Costa Rica invited us to collaborate in raising mental health awareness. The idea we had in mind was a bit different initially, but then it was changed to challenge iGEM teams to show how they de-stress on Instagram posts. So we held a #DeStressChallenge together in August 2021 along with iGEM Vienna. The reason is we know that iGEMers are definitely in the high-stress group, which is why we held this event to remind other iGEMers to relax for a bit and share with other people.
Our team saw that iGEM SZU was involved in a gut-related topic, so we contacted them and introduced our project to each other to see if there are any chances we can work together. At the time, they were designing a card game called IntestiNO and needed some help on the translation part. Although both our teams use Chinese, one is simplified and the other one is traditional. So, we helped them translate into traditional Chinese.
Mingdao, a Taiwanese high school, invited us to an online meetup for sharing our project ideas in July 2021 which we gladly accepted since both of our teams are from Taiwan. We exchanged our ideas and helped each other to find out each other’s shortcomings. They were quite enthusiastic in providing feedback for us, which we deeply appreciated. After the meeting was over, they asked us if we could help them fill in the Salmonella survey and so we did.
Korea_HS, a high school team from South Korea, invited us to join their quarantine themed Instagram project. The objective was to create a sense of community even through pandemic and make it easier for teams to reach out to each other. We just had to send them our team photo and short description about our project. They later on edited the datas we provided and categorized them by our region for easier communication.
We found iGEM Brawijaya on Instagram and were interested in collaborating with them. As we know, synthetic biology is not widely known in both Taiwan and Indonesia. We wanted to promote and educate people about synthetic biology and its application. Thus, we created PowerPoint slides and converted it into an educational video. Our teams divided tasks in the video preparation which made it easier for both of us. The video was uploaded on our Instagram.
iGEM Darmstadt invited us to participate in iJET, a video where worldwide iGEM teams record themselves flying a paper plane to other teams in other countries. We thought this was interesting to make and accepted their offer as it was fun to make. In return, they participated in #DeStressChallenge by Costa Rica, Vienna, and our team. They shared a lot on how they deal with stress! It was refreshing to see how teams helped each other and kept a good relationship.
