Team:WrightState/Communication
Communication
Social Media
As a first year team, one of our primary focuses was to begin our public engagement with the local community at Wright State University and the greater Dayton area. We realized that many are not aware of what iGEM is as an organization or even what synthetic biology is in general. In an effort to raise awareness of our iGEM team and synthetic biology education, team member Natasha Kennel launched social media pages to engage with individuals on a larger scale. As a generalization, more and more young people are turning to social media platforms like Instagram to receive their daily news. In order to reach the next generation of future synthetic biologists we pioneered a social media outreach called "Synbio Saturdays". Each Saturday, Natasha posted original, informative content about various topics in synthetic biology and iGEM on Instagram and Twitter. We were interacted with by notable accounts such as Twist Bioscience and DoDSTEM. Our posts were also shared by individuals in the scientific community as well as amongst peers, accomplishing our goal of reaching some of the students at Wright State University. These posts were brief, yet very interesting and our hope is that they can be continued to be shared to further the conversation on the marvels of synthetic biology. Below was our pilot post, as well as our most popular, "What is Synthetic Biology?"
Chabad of Greater Dayton Day Camp
One of the additional education outreaches we embarked on was performing a hands-on biology demonstration with the children at the Chabad of Greater Dayton. Our team members performed a strawberry DNA extraction experiment as a fun means of introducing synthetic biology to kids ages 7-12. We plan on expanding to more community events like this in the near future.
