Team:Nottingham/Public Engagement

Overview

Welcome to the Nottingham iGEM 2018 Outreach page. Outreach is fundamentally the communication between fellow scientists and non-scientists.
Nottingham iGEM 2018 participated in the University of Nottingham Discovery Day an open day for young children and parents. This was our first outreach event and it helped the team establish a dialogue with members of the public.

We also held workshops at 3 schools with students ages 15-18. They engaged strongly and positively with the activities and showed ample curiosity towards synthetic biology. Not only did this open a new avenue but it helped us understand just how much students knew about synthetic biology and different components of our project, we hope this can be developed further for future curriculums that will be taught in schools.

Finally, we published articles for local newspapers describing what possibilities our project could bring, as well as encouraging readers to engage with us.

Discovery day

16th June 2018

Nottingham iGEM took part in Discovery Day 2018 at the University of Nottingham! We put on a range of fun activities for kids aged 4-10 to learn more about synthetic biology and bacteria microbes!

First, the children got the opportunity to make their own plasticine microbes and put them in petri dishes! They used inspiration from our fun cuddly toy bacterium friends and produced some amazing results.

After that, both kids and adults had a go at guessing which mode of transport had the most bacteria- bus, train or plane. The answer- bus surprised a lot of people- including the adults!

Finally, everyone had a go at seeing how much bacteria was on their hands by using a special gel, then showing their hands under UV light to see how dirty their hands were. It seems that the kids had cleaner hands than most of us university students!

Overall it was an amazing day where we educated kids all about synthetic biology! The parents feedback to our team was incredibly posititve and the kids loved the activites. This was our first outreach activity and we think it was a massive success at engaging kids with iGEM and synthetic biology at such a young age!