Education & Public Engagement

The importance of learning has been a priority for our project from the beginning. From the early stages of working on our project we have been focused on informing and sharing our knowledge with society and raising a public awareness of the topic of our project. Our impression of the public understanding concerning the important role of chaperones and protein folding in general is that it seems to be lacking. This was something we wanted to change. We attempted to do this by focusing on education. In order to engage the public during events we tried to spread the valuable knowledge we have gained throughout the project. Through our collaborations and our integrated human practice we were also been given experiences from other iGEM-teams, society, and different stakeholders.

Read more about our Integrated Human Practice here: *A link will soon be available here...*

Engineers Without Borders Sweden

By implementing engineering expertise, Engineers Without Borders Sweden is actively trying to solve engineering challenges related to inequality and global challenges. Engineers without borders Sweden is an organization and an advisory committee at Linköping university.

During the spring, Engineers Without Borders Sweden had a campus tour for secondary school students and the project team of LiU iGEM 2018 was a halt at this tour. We gave a short lecture about our iGEM project and an introduction to the iGEM-competition.

Summer University - Sommaruniversitet

During three days we supervised laboratory work where groups of secondary school students extracted DNA from a kiwi fruit. Summer University is an annual event organized by Linköping university where secondary school students get the chance of coming to the university and try scientific experiments and learn about the mechanisms connected to the experiments.

We helped plan the experiment we supervised and by doing so we organized it so that it could be connected to our iGEM-project and synthetic biology in general. We taught them about protein folding and the importance of these being folded correctly. By being a part of this event, we got a chance to inspire the participants to become more interested in science.

Kalasmottagningen

Kalasmottagningen is an organisation convention for new students at Linköping University. It is a welcoming event organized by Linköping University to welcome all new attendants to the university and to the student life in Linköping.

Here all new students have the opportunity to become introduced to different student and non-student organisations. About 8000 people were present at Kalasmottagningen this year and LiU iGEM had a stand on the convention. Through this event we got the opportunity to introduce LiU iGEM, iGEM and our Synthetic Biology project to all students, organisations, and companies present at the convention.

TEDx Norrköping

TED-events are incredibly popular and it is a great way of spreading a message worldwide. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that brings people together to share a TED-like experience. According to us in LiU iGEM this was a way to both inform and being informed as well. Through a collaboration with the people in charge of TEDx Norrköping we got the opportunity to have one of our team members make a TEDx-talk. We also found three other speakers for the event that went well with our theme. These speakers were Peter Påhlsson, Andreas Eriksson and Jenny Hagenblad. We also provided the event with pre-recorded TEDx-talk videos that were shown during the event.

About 70 people were in the audience during the TEDx-event. A video will be uploaded to TEDx:s website and with that, hopefully reach many more.

To see our TEDx-talk you can follow this link: *A link will soon be available here...*

Podcast: Attempting Science

An effective way of updating and staying updated nowadays is through podcasts. Throughout the course of our project we have worked on a podcast named “Attempting Science”. In this we discuss our project and other interesting subjects related to studies and synthetic biology.

Attempting science was one of many ways for us to involve the public in our project. By posting it on Soundcloud anyone could listen to it. We also posted about it on our social media accounts (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) to increase the reach of it. This let us achieve one of our goals, to let people who are interested in synthetic biology get the opportunity to learn more, and to reach out with our project.
A podcast given a glance is a podcast with a great chance.

Integrated Human Practices