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 as possible, science villages are set up where universities, research institutes, associations, and companies occupy stands, each of them bringing several interactive experimentations, principally dedicated to children to give them a chance to discover sciences from professionals and students in a fun way. It is the diversity that contributes to the wealth and success of the festival. This year we had a stand on the 12th , 13th and 14th october on 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 the fake news , so we do a “jungle speed” about the GMOs fake news by means of a quizz that we prepared building on articles . We also discuss with them about the biology , and our project .It was interessent because a lot of pupils were scared about GMOs without knowing what is it . We want to spark light on their mind 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 all public , so we continue the game for the children and we present our project to the others .With a poster we explain what is “breaking bugs” project , a lot of people were enthusiastic about it , and some of them were victims bed bugs , so they share their story with us , we had testimony of peoples whose spend thousands to get rid of bed bugs . we discuss about current solutions and what are the advantage of our solution .With others we debated on the GMOs and the Synthétic biology , this exchanges was rewarding for us and our project , we were directly confronted to the general public and we could see how the 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. Being a problem very widespread in big cities like Marseille, our project was welcome to the public. They seem to be enthusiastic about fighting bed bugs biologically but remain skeptical about synthetic biology. After having better explained how our project can integrate into society using synthetic biology they seem to bring a more positive regard. We particularly caught the attention of families. But we also noticed the interest of scientists in our project. Indeed, most scientists travel a lot around the world. They also liked the idea of using a mushroom to kill bed bugs. Moreover, we were pleasantly surprised to see many people who already knew our project. This shows that we 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 in our project. Others have heard of "young students wanting to get rid of bed bugs, on television", thanks to the communication that the news could make. 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.