Team:Aix-Marseille/ScienceFestival
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, and is still piloted by the ministry. The festival offers a meeting point between the general public and the actors of science. Giving an opportunity 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 richness, and the success of the festival. This year we had a stand for three days, the 12th, 13th, and 14th October, in the Marseille science village.
The first day was dedicated to the school children, so we had to catch their attention in a fun way. For this event we decided to make them aware of fake news, so we did a “jungle speed” about fake news about GMOs with a quiz that we prepared based on articles. We also 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 a little the gap between science, especially biology, 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 the others. With a poster, we explained the “breaking bugs” project. A lot of people were very enthusiastic 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 GMO's 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. 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.