The fête de la science or science festival is a national event that promotes scientific awareness and, in a festive setting, exchanges between science and society! It was started 27 years ago by the French ministry of higher education, research, and innovation. The festival offers a meeting point between the general public and the actors of science. It offers massive opportunities through experiments, debate, and exchanges, for the public to gain new knowledge and to form opinions about the issues facing our society.

To cover as many cities as possible, science villages are set up where universities, research institutes, scientific associations and clubs, and companies can occupy stands, all of them bringing interactive experiments to stimulate the public. It is this diversity that contributes to the success of the festival. This year we had a stand for three days, on the 12th, 13th, and 14th of october, at thescience village held in Marseille.

The first day was dedicated to the school children, so we had to catch their attention in a fun way. We decided to warn them about fake news, so we did a “jungle speed” and GMOs quiz about the subject. Additionaly, we discussed biology with them and our breaking bugs project. It was interesting because a lot of the children were scared of GMOs without really knowing what they were. We wanted to spark their curiosity and encourage them to find out for themselves beyond this game. We hope that this intervention bridged the gap between science and society.

The second and third days were open to the general public, so we continued the game for children and we presented our project to others. With a poster, we explained the “breaking bugs” project. A lot of people were very excited about it, and some of them were victims of bed bugs, so they shared their stories with us. We had evidence from many people who had spent thousands of euros to get rid of bed bugs. We discussed current solutions and the advantage of our solution. With other people, we debated about GMOs and synthetic biology. These exchanges were rewarding for us and our project. We were directly confronted with the general public and we could see how society welcomed our project.

During these three days we have again been able to notice that many people are or have been infested by bed bugs. Our project was welcomed to the public. They seem to be enthusiastic about fighting bed bugs biologically but remain skeptical about synthetic biology.

Moreover, we were pleasantly surprised to see many people who already knew our project. This shows that we have managed to communicate our project to the public. Some of them had already met us during our participation in previous events and enjoyed seeing the progress we have made in our project. Others have heard of "'young students wanting to get rid of bed bugs. Finally, some people met the team of the previous year at the same event and were curious to know the rest of the adventure within the iGEM.