Home Team Team Attributions Collaborations Project Description Design Proof of concept Engineering Results Notebook Implementation Contribution Experiments Parts Safety Human Human Practices Communication Partnership Jamboree Organization Awards Education Model Sustainable Education and Communication Introduction From our point of view, science should not be confined within laboratory walls, it is important that the advances we achieve reach the overall population. We are aware that usually science is seen as something difficult to understand but we want to prove this wrong and explain simple scientific concepts as well as our iGEM project idea. Moreover, the pandemic we are living in has created the perfect environment for science communication as everybody is more familiar with simple scientific concepts such as DNA, antibody, protein or mutation. Research We conducted a survey among the Spanish population that showed little knowledge of the respondents about synthetic biology, however, they seemed interested in finding out more about this topic. For all of these reasons, we decided to carry out some scientific outreach sessions. Figure 1. Some of our team members in the streets of Zaragoza conducting the surveys we prepared. Our approach For this sessions, we designed a huge roll-up poster in which we explained what is iGEM and what is our project about. This poster helped us attract people to our stand as it made them wonder what we were doing there. We also prepared a set of very visual and simple experiments that allowed us to explain some concepts such as DNA purification, blood type, antibody... You can find the protocols we followed for the experiments here. Figure 2. Roll-up poster. Figure 3. Our stand with different experiments. During the months of August and September, we placed a stand in the streets of different Aragonese towns for the science outreach sessions. With our set of experiments, we aimed especially at children and young people to bring science closer to them. But often adults were also very interested in what we were doing and in iGEM competition so it was a perfect opportunity to explain our project to them and demand feedback, which really helped us. We also shared these events in our social media so as to reach a larger audience. We also took part in the European Researchers´ night at the Paraninfo of the University of Zaragoza and at the CaixaForum. These sessions had some differences from the ones done previously the people who went there were predisposed to learning. We exploited this and developed a new set of experiments and activities that allowed us to deeply explain our project, the applications of nanobodies and some daily labwork protocols such as cloning and transforming bacteria. Our experience We had a really good time performing these scientific sessions as getting in touch with people that are interested in your work is really motivating. For further information visit our Education page.
