Lyon Jamboree

Since our team is based in Grenoble, we are the nearest team to Lyon which is the location of the European Jamboree this year. That is why we thought we should participate in some way in the organization of the Jamboree.
The feedback we got from previous teams indicate a lack of social interaction between teams during the Jamboree, and we decided to do something about it. Indeed we feel that this Jamboree is a wonderful opportunity to meet with students from different countries and universities, and we created some activities in order to facilitate communication and interaction between people.

A Giant Meeting Place

At first we did not have a precise idea of the type of activities we wanted to do, but the goal was clear: it should be an icebreaker for people to start talking and bounding. Our first idea was to organize “cohesion games”, for 2h during the week-end. These are fun games played in teams, which would have been composed of people from different iGEM teams. But we thought it could be difficult to ask for two complete hours in the weekend schedule, already quite full.
Then we thought of an activity that would last all along the weekend, but would not need all teams to be free at the same time. Teams will have several challenges to perform, mostly picture challenges, with different other teams they will have to find first.

Once we adopted this idea, the different points we had to settle were:

• Contact the organization team of the Jamboree in Lyon, in order to get their approbation
• Find a lot of challenges for the teams
• Create a database of all European iGEM team members

Contact Lyon

The organization team in Lyon was quite enthusiastic in their response, and supported our idea. We talked about several points of organization:

• We will make one envelope for each team, explaining our project and giving a first set of challenges, and this envelope will be put in the welcome pack distributed at the beginning of the Jamboree.
• When a challenge is done, the team should send us an email via the wifi network present everywhere in INSA-Lyon.
• When all challenges of the list are done, teams should come to us for more challenges.
• If possible, we will put a selection of pictures and results sent to us on a special webpage on iGEM Lyon website.
• During the saturday night social event, we will have 5mn to talk about this project and present the first results of the challenges.

Ideas of Challenges

The challenges we thought of can be categorized as follow:

• Pictures
• With as many teams and countries as possible
• By background (modeler, biologist, ...)
• All the teams from the same country
• With some other team's T-shirts
• Human pyramids
• Videos
• Say a few words in another language
• Sing a song in another language
• Anecdotes
• On the iGEM team experience
• On the university experience

Create a database

We went through all European teams’ official profiles in order to gather all names of team members, number of members per team, number of teams per country. This database is to help us maximize the teams mixing for our challenges. Our goal being to make teams from opposite sides of Europe meet and share experience.

A few numbers then

We are 59 teams in Europe this year, from 15 different countries, and we totalize 645 students !