Education & Public Engagement

The importance of learning has been a priority for our project from the beginning. From the beginning of our project we have been focused on learning from, and sharing our knowledge with society in order to raise public awareness of our project. In the beginning of our project we got the impression that public awareness about protein folding and chaperones seems to be somewhat sparse. This is something we wanted to change.

We attempted to make a change in public awareness about our topic by focusing on education. In order to engage the public during events we tried to spread some of the valuable knowledge we have gained throughout the project. Through our collaborations and integrated human practice we were also given the experience of other iGEM teams, society and different stakeholders.

Podcast: Attempting Science

An effective way of updating and staying updated nowadays is through podcasts. Since podcasts have the potential to reach a large group of people and can be about virtually anything one finds interesting or funny we though this was a good way to reach out to a larger audience with our project. The result became a podcast that has been updated on a regular basis throughout our project called "Attempting Science". In this podcast we talked about our project, in order to get a slightly broader range of subjects we also talked about other interested subjects relating to our fields of study and synthetic biology. After the Nordic iGEM conference we also invited the iGEM team from Chalmers University to participate. In this episode we talked about their project and about problems we have been facing along the way.

By posting our episodes on Soundcloud anyone could listen to them. However, since we do not have a large amount followers there we also posted about it on our social media accounts (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) to increase the reach of each episode. This let us achieve one of our goals, to find a fun way to let people who want to learn more about synthetic biology to learn more, and to reach out with our project. It is avaliable on our Youtube and Soundcloud!

A podcast given a glance is a podcast with a great chance.

Engineers Without Borders Sweden

Engineers Without Boarders Sweden is an organisation that is trying to solve problems linked to sustainable development goals around the world by implementing their engineering expertise. One of their many goals is to inform young students about what being an engineer means, and how diverse that role is so more people might become interested in pursuing a career in engineering.

During the spring this year Engineers Without borders in Linköping hosted a tour of the campus for secondary school students. The tour aimed at inspiring young students to pursue a higher education, and to show what you can do during, and after your studies. As this fitted well with our goal to reach out with our project we got to be one of the stops on the tour. At our stop we held a short introduction into the field of synthetic biology and our project, focusing on the diversity of the field.

The Summer Week - Sommarveckan

Another way for us to reach out to the public and to inspire people to become more interested in science was ro participate in an event called Sommarveckan. Sommarveckan is an annual event organised by Linköping University. During this event secondary school students get to come to come to the university for a couple of days to try out scientific experiments and to learn about the mechanisms connected to the experiments they perform.

Leading up to the event we helped plan an experiment themed "Discovering chemistry".
This resulted in a lab where the students got to extract DNA from a kiwi. After the experiments we talked about what one does with the DNA after it has been extracted. Based on what the students had done in the lab, we then supervised a discussion on synthetic biology and showed what we were doing in our project. Hopefully, this helped spark an interest in science and in wanting to learn new things.

Kalasmottagningen

Kalasmottagningen is a welcoming fair for new students at Linköping University where the different student organisations show what they are doing. This gives a brilliant opportunity for new students to get introduced to the student life. This year about 8 000 students attended and LiU iGEM had a stand at the fair.

Through this event we got the opportunity to talk to a lot of new students about 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...*