Team:Aix-Marseille/Collaborations
This year, despite COVID 19 epidemic, we had the chance to exchange during projects organized by other iGEM teams. That's also what iGEM is all about, isn't it?
We participated in a postcards exchange program organised by the Düsseldorf Team for the fourth year in a row. Several iGEM teams designed postcards with a little summary about their project. After sending our postcard we received postcards from other teams. It was fun to learn more about teams from different countries.
Our team also participated in the artistic exhibition organised by Nantes Team. we had to create a masterpiece about “algae and science” and “science and art”. As our project tackles the green tides problem, this exhibition was perfect for us. We created, with the help of people outside the team, a picture of a car constituted of algae to represent the fact that we want to produce bioethanol from algae that could be used in adapted vehicles . In the background we wanted to show that our project would be good for the environment. To do so, we represented our current polluted society on the right and, on the left, the possible society we could live in thanks to some projects including ours. Thanks to this exhibition we shared our project with an uninformed audience.In addition, this project was very different from the other ones, it was the opportunity to be creative and to do something else than science on our project.
We had a video call with the Nantes Team, when we knew that our two teams were working on green algae we thought about a collaboration. However they were studying the revalorization of algae in sulfuric acid, and we wanted to revalorize it into bio-ethanol.
Our projects being very different we could not find any possible collaboration, but we get a lot of positive feedback from our exchanges. It was an opportunity to see how other teams were managing their project, and how they were living and organizing themselves for the competition in this very special context of pandemic.
This summer, french speaking teams collaborated all together to create a big video about all of us. Indeed, Grenoble Team proposed french speaking teams to make a video about their project to finally gather all videos in a big one in french since it is our mother tongue. Some teams presented their project, other ones presented team members or their city. To make it accessible for more people we added subtitles in english. It was cool to take part in a big project like this one with other iGEM teams. It was the opportunity to talk and share with a lot of other students.
Check out the video on the facebook page of the Grenoble team here
On August 1st, we participated in a meeting organized by the Copenhagen Team.
Each participant presented his project, then, divided into groups of 3 we had to mix their project to form one. We then played in Skribbl io. Teams from several different countries were present. It was really interesting, and it's great to meet iGEMers colleagues.