Team:Thrace/Communication

Science communication is something that we are deeply passionate about. As future scientists, we feel that it is our duty to build foundations on which we can rely on to communicate scientific topics during our careers. During this pandemic, it has become especially apparent that science communication isn’t something simple. Effective science communication is a complex process that requires planning and adapting to different situations. This year, we witnessed many failed attempts at communicating science, both from renowned scientists and from our own selves, so we decided that perhaps a different approach is needed. That’s why we focused on the so-called “non-typical forms of education” to communicate science.

Erasmus+

During our Erasmus+ programme, we and the other iGEM teams were given the opportunity to explore the boundaries of communication and to experiment with alternative ways of conveying a message. We used non-typical forms of education like theatre, dance and visual art, in order to communicate to the general public scientific topics like climate change, synthetic biology and Covid-19. We decided to use these methods instead of more traditional ones, because they can often be more effective in communicating a particular topic. Since they avoid scientific terminology, they can be easier to understand by people of any age or background. What is more, these forms of communication are more memorable and engaging and they also make education more fun. For the reasons mentioned above, we chose to utilize non-typical forms of education to communicate to the local public important scientific topics.

Through our participation at the European Youth Event 2021, we reiterated what we had already practiced at the Erasmus+ programme. We had the opportunity to organize an activity, which revolved around communicating science through art and other non-typical forms of education. During our activity, we explained to the participants through verbal and visual aids how communication via these forms is made possible and why it is important. Afterwards, the participants got to practice this in real time.

They used their knowledge to create powerful science communication acts that were memorable, meaningful and easy to understand at the same time. Once again, we acknowledged the importance of communicating science the right way. We are grateful that we were given the chance to spread our knowledge and experience to the youths of Europe and also to raise awareness on the currently very relevant topic of science communication.

Social media

Τhe power of social media nowadays is huge and that is why we wanted to use ours as a means of educating and communicating synthetic biology- and science in general. Addressing the general public, we wanted not to delve too deep into the scientific part, with which many are not related, but to design a series of facts that had a scientific basis but were also fun to know.

When it comes to our project, from the beginning we gave hints about what the topic we chose would be, while giving information about colon cancer, the examination methods and the current problems.

Furthermore, during the year we researched the world for international days that were worth noting. So, we created relevant posts, for days not only related to science but to society as a whole, always accompanied by essential information. Some examples are World Cancer Day, International Day of Women in Science, World Autism Day, National Cancer Survivors Day and many more.

Especially, for the National Cancer Survivors Day, we interviewed three powerful women who survived cancer, and created a video to inform and inspire others.

iGEM Biefeld

iGEM IISER Bhopal

Download SynBio Workbook iGEM Thrace.pdf

Science communication through collaborations

Two of our collaborations this year (apart from the Erasmus+ programme) revolved around the communication of science, the one with iGEM Bielefeld and the one with iGEM IISER Bhopal. Both of them included us translating a text to Greek, but in different contexts. In the first one, we translated answers to kid’s questions about science. In the second one, we translated a synthetic biology workbook, aimed at highschool or undergraduate students who are interested in delving deeper into the topic of synthetic biology.

Through both of these projects we wanted to aid the communication of science and especially synthetic biology in Greece and to make more Greek people interested in synthetic biology, so we are glad to have participated in these collaborations!

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