Team:UiOslo Norway/Public Engagement

Education & Engagement

One of the components of the Human Practices is Education and Public Engagement. Here we are going to show you how we engaged and educated both scientists and the public about the synthetic biology. In our case, how we employed synthetic biology to create a precise diagnostic method that could prevent further spread of antimycotic resistance.

Presentation for new master students

At the beginning of the academic year, three members from our team held a presentation for the new master students at the Institute for Biosciences at the University of Oslo. The presentation contained information about the history of iGEM, what iGEM is, the benefits and learning experiences acquired when being a member of an iGEM team, as well as information about our project Canditect.

Our goal with this presentation was to both spread awareness about our project and what we are trying to accomplish, as well as inspire new students to join next year’s team.

Social media

A very effective way to spread awareness about our project is to use social media. Since the UiOslo_Norway Team already had a Facebook and an Instagram account, we wanted to keep these pages alive.

We had different approaches for each social media platform.

At our Facebook page we started with team-member introduction weeks. Every Monday we posted a short summary of every team member, about the duties and responsibilities the person had in the group, as well as general information about the person. After presenting all members it was time to present our project by launching project-description-Tuesdays. The aim of these posts was to inform our followers on how our project was built up, which world-wide problems we wanted to face with our work and what kind of components we are going to use. Lastly, we launched collaboration-Wednesdays, showcasing our collaborations with other iGEM Teams from Europe.

If you wanted to know more about the daily life of our team, following our Instagram page would be the right choice. There we posted pictures about our group meetings, and funny moments in lab. Of course, our team was also meeting each other in the evenings or weekends after a hard work day in lab. You could always be up to date on our leisure activities if you followed us on Instagram.

If you are interested about our Facebook and Instagram pages, follow us:

Facebook Instagram

We will also be posting during the Giant Jamboree, stay tuned!

The 'Cutting Edge' festival!

The event is a science, technology and innovation festival for scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, investors, policy makers and startups.

Two members from Team UiOslo_Norway had the opportunity to attend the ‘Cutting Edge Festival’ at Oslo Science Park in September. The festival is part of Oslo Innovation Week. During the event there were presentations, workshops, debates and exhibitions.

We presented our project with a poster and a stand. We are grateful for the opportunity to both present our project to people with various backgrounds, as well as the chance to come in contact with several companies that could help us take our project further. Additionally, we attended several talks about the genetic revolution, and how we can use current DNA editing tools in an innovative way.

EVOGENE seminar

In October, our team had the opportunity to present our project to the research Section for Genetics and Evolutionary Biology (EVOGENE), but also showcase the iGEM competition. EVOGENE is a research and learning environment based on a broad range of biological disciplines that merge in the perception of genetics and evolutionary thinking as a basis for their endeavor. In the first part of the lecture we gave the audience an introduction into iGEM and how important this competition is for students in matters of learning how to conduct a scientific project. After that we presented our “Canditect” project.

It was a great to have the opportunity to practice our presentation we will be holding in Boston. Furthermore, we could practice answering questions from the audience, and received a lot of valuable feedback.

After the EVOGENE presentation, Åslaug Brynildsen held a presentation workshop for us. She is a science- and communications advisor at the University of Oslo, but also a former theatre performer. During the workshop she provided us with a lot of useful tips on how to use our voice and body language in an engaging way. She gave us useful tips on how to make our presentation more interesting for the audience, through the use of animations and humour.

Presentation at the Egbert-Gymnasium, Germany

In early October, one of our team members held a presentation at the Egbert-Gymnasium Münsterschwarzach (German high school). The aim of this presentation was to engage young people and spark interest in natural sciences. About 100 pupils aged between 16 and 18 years listened to the presentation. The aim of the lecture was to educate the audience about three topics:

• How is it to be a student in natural sciences?
• What are scientific competitions like iGEM?
• What is the “Canditect” project about?

The pupils showed great interest in these topics. At the end of the presentation they asked a lot of questions. All in all the teachers were very grateful that we educated the pupils and they hope that some of them will choose a career as a scientist.

Our presentation was featured in two newspapers, the Mainpost and the Egbert-gymnasium schoolpaper.

Blogpost by Nordic Biosite

One of our sponsors, Nordic Biosite, featured our project on their blog. Their blog gives a quick introduction to iGEM and our project, and we are very grateful for their sponsorship and their faith in our project.

Clicking the image takes you to their blogpost