Public Engagement
Introducing Synthetic Biology to someone can be a tough task, even more in the case of a non-academic public. We’ve accepted to face this challenge at the 21ª Semana Temática de Biologia (21st Biology thematic week)
Biology thematic week is an annual biology event that takes place at Institute of Biosciences of University of São Paulo. The event’s main goal is complementing the academic formation of Biology students and promote the interaction of students with teachers and the community through courses and workshops.
We’ve been invited to present iGEM and synthetic biology. The initial plan was to make a simple presentation about our experience in the competition and our project which is simple to do for a biology students public. But the main obstacle was teaching Synthetic Biology in a quick and efficient manner to the general public. For that, we brought two synthetic biology games developed by other teams in the past years: Biotech and Game of genes.
Biomech is a board game that prompts the players to make creative solutions to diverse situations with a synthetic biology approach. Given a specific situation (like creating energy in a desert or sealing a toxic gas leak), the players must use molecular biology concepts to create the best solution. For that, each player receives random cards representing biobrick parts, which will be used to design a plasmid that will be put in a E coli in order to resolve the problem. The winner is the player that comes with the most creative and convincing solution. This game had been developed by the University of Exeter team by 2016 and the portuguese version was created by the USP-Brazil team at 2017. This game approach combined with a conversation about the mais topics in synthetic biology showed to be a lot more effective than a more expositive lecture approach.
Based on our experience last year, we hoped it would be a fun activity that would be able to communicate the basic about synthetic biology. It was incredible to see how fast a public with no molecular biology background could readily learn about some fundamentals mechanisms in Synthetic Biology.