Team:Aix-Marseille/ScienceFestival

The fête de la science or science festival is a national event that promotes scientific culture and, in a festive setting, exchanges between science and society! Led for 27 years by the French ministry of higher education, research, and innovation, it is a meeting point between the general public and the actors of science who through experimentation, debate, and exchange, offer the opportunity to build new knowledge and to form opinions about the issues facing our society.

To cover the most cities possible, science villages are set up where universities, research institutes, associations, and companies occupy stands, each of them bringing several interactive experiments. It is this diversity that contributes to the wealth and success of the festival.This year we had a stand on 12th, 13th and 14th October in the departmental archive of Marseille.

The first day was dedicated to the scholar, so we had to hoc their attention in a fun way. For this event we decided to make them aware about fake news, so we did a “jungle speed” abou fake news about GMOs with a quiz that we prepared based on articles. We also discussed biology with them, and our project. It was interesting because a lot of pupils were scared about GMOs without knowing what they are. We want to spark their curiosity and a lot of knowledge beyond this game. We hope that this intervention bridging a little the gap between biology and society.

The second and third days was open to the general public, so we continued the game for children and we presented our project to the others. With a poster we explained the “breaking bugs” project. A lot of people were enthusiastic about it, and some of them were victims of bed bugs, so they shared their stories with us. We had testimony of people who spent thousands to get rid of bed bugs. We discussed current solutions and the advantage of our solution. With others we debated GMOs and Synthétic 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.