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Team:BGU Israel/Outreach
From 2013.igem.org
Outreach Introduction
We embarked on a massive outreach campaign to encourage discourse with the public about synthetic biology, in order to dispel misconceptions and foster debate. Our outreach campaign was aimed at reaching as many people from different communities and age groups as possible. We wanted to burst out of the invisible walls separating the academy from the general public and trigger discussions in a variety of platforms, making the subject accessible to all.
SynBio for Kids
It’s a cliché, but children really are the future (and so is synthetic biology!). We believe that exposing children to science is crucial for creating the next generation of researchers and their supporters. Therefore, we wanted to make sure that our outreach campaign reached not only adults but children and teenagers as well, to get them thinking at an early age about synthetic biology and the challenges and possibilities it offers. Synthetic biology is a natural match for kids’ unlimited curiosity and creativity: it’s like playing Lego with life!
Science Night
Team BGU_Israel participated in the annual Science Night, a science festival for children that took place in several cities around the country, particularly in our university. The festival included numerous lectures, movie screenings, tours in university facilities, exhibitions, and activities, oriented especially for kids, families, and anyone interested in a peek into the world of science. Our team set up a few stands with a number of activities for children to learn about synthetic and micro biology: growing bacteria from your finger on petri dishes before and after using hand sanitizer (showing the importance of washing your hands as well!), and writing your name in DNA by translating English letters into codons and making the sequence into colorful decorations of DNA strands for the upcoming holiday season. For the parents and older children, we presented the iGEM foundation and our project, and distributed our public opinion survey about synthetic biology.
Activity Kit
Since Science Night was such a big success, we decided to make our activities and materials available for anyone to easily use. And so, we present the "Synbio Activity Kit for Kids", including detailed explanation about the activities plus all materials needed. We hope many future teams will use these activities and add their own!Get the full kit here.
Media
We took a two-pronged approach to our media campaign in order to make synthetic biology accessible to as many people as possible through a wide variety of channels.
New Media: The Bottom-Up Approach
For many people, new media, including websites, blogs, and social networks, has become a major source of information about the world. Its unique advantage over forms of traditional media is that it enables a direct dialog between the public and the source, in which people can express their positions freely. It can also make information accessible to a wider range of people, who are not involved in the field or who don’t read traditional news sources. For researchers, new media is an important tool to enable a complex issue, such as synthetic biology, to become accessible for the general public. During the past months, we addressed the public through a wide range of channels, including:
- A number of blogs.
- Podcasts
- We opened a Youtube channel featuring a whiteboard animation explaining our project and a number of other videos of our group at various events.
- Our official Facebook page received more than 3,000 likes and has reached over 200,000 people from over 20 different countries.
The page has allowed us to directly interact with people and answer their concerns and questions, and we have received hundreds of messages and comments on Facebook.
Our personal favorite was a message from a fourteen year old girl:
”Science has been my biggest dream since I was a child. You have inspired me to believe I can fulfill this dream one day.” She heard about the project through a popular Facebook page called ”Tweeting Statuses”, which posted a goofy picture of the team with a caption explaining our project, and got around 3,400 likes and over 600 shares the day it was posted. - We also launched a crowd-funding campaign, in which we introduced synthetic biology and asked for help from the public to raise the last of the needed funds to participate in the competition. The campaign was very successful, raising 171% of our initial goal.
Conventional Media: The Top-Down Approach
Despite the recent rise of new media, conventional media still has enormous influence in education and creating a public debate. In general, stories in newspapers, TV programs, and news websites have a longer, more informative format, and we took advantage of all three for our human practice campaign. Moreover, traditional media reaches segments of the population who are not necessarily active on Facebook or other new media sources.
- A feature story about our project and the iGEM competition was broadcasted on Israel’s national television, and we also appeared on a morning show on Channel 2, Israel’s most viewed channel.
- We were also interviewed on Israel’s national radio and in the South’s regional radio.
- One of Israel’s biggest economic news sources, the Calcalist, published a printed as well as digital article about the project and the iGEM competition.
- We also appeared in Israel’s biggest science news website – Hayadaan and in the synthetic biology website GetSynBio.
- The project was covered in a two-page spread in Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s most popular printed newspaper, and a version of the article appeared in the homepage of its online counterpart, the most popular news website in Israel, Ynet News.
Special Events
Ever go to a wine-tasting and get a taste of synthetic biology? Or read a great science fiction novel and discover that actually, it’s close to becoming reality? Or attended a day of lectures for the general public inspired by synthetic biology?
Wine Festival
Gooogle
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Yanki
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Art
To spice up our outreach efforts, we looked for humorous, creative and fun ways to promote synthetic biology. One of our initiatives was connecting synthetic biology to art!
SynBio Caricature Competition
We organized a synthetic biology caricature contest that we advertised in various art programs and on Facebook, to give a chance for art creative way to explain synthetic biology in an illustration of any kind. Our purpose was both to collect funny and sharp caricatures and to let people with no biological background think about synthetic biology and describe it or criticize it using art.
Gallery in the University
Bio Ethics
We wanted to engage the community in a discussion of the ethical questions involved in synthetic biology, and so we crowdsourced for questions for an ethics FAQ.
Q:A: Q:A: Q:A: Q:A:
