Education & engagement

Social Media

We believe that social media poses a great opportunity for reaching people and informing them about different topics. That is why we decided to use our social media accounts to spread data about our project. (the links to our accounts are in this page's footer)

Through this media, we shared information about the microplastic particles, and the EDCs derived from water bottles. Our objective was to increase awareness in our community about this problem and the negative impact such substances have on human health; however, we also took advantage of our hundreds of followers on Instagram to raise people’s interest in science, by posting weekly infographics about different topics related to biology and other sciences. As we know that some of our followers aren’t quite related to the scientific field, we tried to make our materials simple, concrete, and attractive, so the information would be easy to learn.

Furthermore, we used our social media to announce our fundraising activities (like webinars), our collaborations with other iGEM teams, as well as with other organizations, and to share our achievements with our community (like winning the iGEM 2021 Impact Grant).

Additionally, social media platforms helped us maintain an effective and constant communication with students at our university that are interested in our project and would also like to participate in next year’s iGEM competition.

IGEM TEC CEM + BIOTEC +STEM

We were really enthusiastic about this invitation, since we are both students teams from Engineering in Biotechnology we felt close to our Biological Science community. We were able to express our microplastic and EDCs concern and show how our project helps this situation from a little technical point of view. We also received questions from the spectators about our principal objective as a research group, showing the synthetic biology reach and field of study relating to human health and environment. Check it out here.

We noticed how interested other alumni are on our campus projects and how they share the same concern as ours about plastics and their potential impact not only on the environment but on health. Also, the story reached out to a part of our campus science community, with constant spectators and rising followers from both accounts.

Green Fest

Green Fest was an event organized by “Huella Verde” which is a Mexican organization and a student group of Tecnológico de Monterrey, Puebla, Mexico. Dedicated to the conservation of the environment. The focus of this event was mainly on three areas, the first being that conferences were held in science and health, The second focused on community welfare and environmental care and the third focused more on garbage collection throughout Mexico. This was about seeking common wellness and environmental care through remote activities during the pandemic. We think this proposal was an extraordinary event where we were able to assist and to impart a conference focusing on the affections that plastic degradation has on earth and health. The authors of this amazing event were Mel Juarez and her amazing team. The event held more than 26 conferences with speakers all over Mexico. Reaching out to a great number of adults, youth and kids.

In this sense we collaborate with the part of the conferences giving a considerable scope about our project and how we are seeking to generate a solution to the problem of EDCs in the water that is consumed as part of our daily lives.

This was to have an impact on the expectorators who are mostly young people who are considered to be part of the change that both in Mexico and in other countries will make the decisions that will lead us to have a better world, more sustainable and providing solutions to current problems.

External students group “Huella verde”.

A channel where we exposed a problem to a large audience with impact. We, as a team, are seriously concerned about the well-being of the community and care of the environment. Therefore, our interests connected with those of the Huella Verde student group in which they were taught wellness, science and math conferences as a garbage recollection as well. People, teams, speakers, schools attended virtually from all over Mexico to this excellent event where we gave a conference about our project and the microplastic and EDC´s problem we are facing.

Video for "Escuderías"

The “Escuderias” are student groups that are part of the Tecnologico de Monterrey and which develop different projects with impact in their areas of specialization. In our case iGEM TEC CEM was considered as a team being part of our institution because with our project we seek to give an innovative solution to a problem that involves us all as a society that is water sanitation specifically with drinking water which is a branch that has a greater relevance for involving the health of human beings.

Therefore, we offered a conference to the university community of our institution where we explain how we develop each area that makes up our project both the biological area and the electronics area, In addition to explaining technical things, we made an emphasis on what is the problem we are solving and why its solution is so important in today's society, in the field of health, as well as in the field of cultural and environmental care.

With the preparation of this video conference we seek primarily to expose our project to our community so that they are motivated and know the Mexican talent of our same university that is having an initiative in science aimed at providing solutions to current problems and that they take this into consideration to continue along the same path seeking that at some point they also generate solutions like those we are doing and together we build a better country. (To learn more about the video conference click here)

On the other hand, we will be looking for platforms alternatives to the social networks that we manage as twitter, instagram and facebook to reach more people and therefore we consider to make a TikTok that is a tool that allows us to explain in a very structured way, our project is dynamic and simple in order to be shared with the students of our university and with people who liked science within this social tool and therefore have a greater reach since it is a popular platform among most ages around the world (To see our TikTok click here)

Webinars for students

With the aim of raising funds for our project and spreading knowledge about various and interesting topics, we offered a series of webinars for students, related to biology, entrepreneurship, economy, scientific research, creativity, and mathematical modeling. The webinars were opened for students from other schools as well, which helped us reach a broader audience. The cost of each webinar was $3 USD and the money collected was used to purchase different devices and laboratory reagents necessary for the development of our project.

It is worth noting that the planning of our fundraising activities was challenging for us, since, due to the pandemic, we couldn’t do the events that iGEM teams normally carry out at our campus to finance their projects, thus we had to think of something new that was attractive enough for the students to participate. We came up with the idea of organizing an activity in which students could learn something new about different disciplines and that is why we got in touch with several experts, who helped us prepare educational material for students.

We believe that this was an effective and useful way of fundraising, as it contributed to our objective of spreading the knowledge within our community and it also helped us to acquire the financial resources we needed.

We hope that the next iGEM teams continue to host these webinars along with the other activities that are generally performed at the university.

SMBB

A very important part of scientific development is to share knowledge with others, that is why we participated in the Mexican Society of Biotechnology and Bioengineering (SMBB) congress (read more here). This allowed us to talk about our project and communicate the advances we had until that time, which consisted only of in silico work, since we didn’t have access to a laboratory yet. Specifically, our participation involved the writing of a scientific article talking about the problematic we were focused on and the solution we were implementing. After this, we had to prepare a video to summarize all our information and share it with the community.

We greatly valued taking part in this activity and having the opportunity to contribute to the dissemination of biotechnological and scientific advances. Also, one of the congress’ objectives was to involve the new generations in this field of knowledge at an international level, so we think that it is a very effective way to learn and acquire knowledge, whereby we are very excited to participate again the future with new projects and also to encourage the next iGEM Tec CEM generation to join.

China entrepreneurship contest

iGEM TEC CEM was invited to participate in this exciting bio innovating contest for the World Sciences Summit. It will be held in Hangzhou at the end of October 2021 and will have speeches, conferences, life science industry forum, table discussions and awarding activities from all over the world. Team guests are young students and scientists, researchers or innovative leaders that will share their projects in this cultural exchange.

This outstanding contest gives us the chance not only of being part of another international massive event, but to learn from each team and become better, as to clean our business plan and all of our proposals for further application.

In our poster presentation for this entrepreneurship contest we explain the resume of our project, you will see further information about it on the Project description seccion of this web page. Click it.

We invite you to check and follow our China trip on our instagram account!

Team:TecCEM/Communication