Team:NUS Singapore/Partnership
Partnership
Introduction
In our iGEM journey, one of our main aims was to promote synthetic biology in our community, driven by our desire to promote synthetic biology as a promising pathway for students and adults alike to embark in and support due to its limitless potential. There is limited exposure to Synthetic biology in secondary institutions, and there are only a few modules offered in NUS on Synthetic Biology. Seeing this as a shared problem, the NUS iGEM and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) iGEM teams came together to promote education in synthetic biology!
This partnership allowed us to reflect on crucial concepts regarding science communication throughout our project development. Especially for our project, we needed to build an easy-to-understand system for users with little to no science background. Our experience with NTU in the general synthetic biology education campaign gave us a hands-on experience to understand how to create user-friendly science content. Throughout this partnership, the teams came up with initiatives to promote synthetic biology and get the general populace excited about the topic. We set the following goals in our journey:
1. Introduce the basic of synthetic biology and how it permeates our lives
2. Highlight some of the current implementations of synthetic biology and how it opens doors for further developments
To achieve this goal, we came up with two main initiatives: A collaborative educational outreach workshop for secondary institutions and a video series for the general public.
Educational Outreach
In collaboration with the National Junior College (NJC), we developed a program to introduce students in Secondary School and Junior College (aged 14 - 18) to Synthetic Biology. Both teams collaboratively designed a virtual, half-day event, "µBioMachines", that introduced the students to synthetic biology using interactive activities and lectures. We used a combination of tools to engage our audience, to instil an interest in synthetic biology among them! Find out more about the outreach programme here.
Video Series
Parallel to the outreach event, our teams developed a video series that introduced our projects and synthetic biology to the larger community. The videos also explored how synthetic biology can be integrated with diagnostics and agriculture, relevant parts of our daily lives. To keep the attention of our audience, all of our videos ranged between 5 to 7 minutes. Additionally, we used the benefit of a short run-time to promote our series via our social media platform, Instagram.
Key Takeaways
Throughout the process, both teams worked collaboratively, offering their knowledge and creative inputs into the videos. Through this, not only were we able to help each other fine-tune our material, but we were also able to learn more about the applications of synthetic biology!
Our partnership with the NTU iGEM team allowed us to promote synthetic biology in our local community. We were able to use iGEM as a platform to not only develop a project both teams were passionate about but also to spread our love and appreciation for synthetic biology in our country.
We are sincerely grateful to the NTU iGEM team for having been a part of this journey with us, and all of our external collaborators who have helped us make this possible!
