Team:Exeter/Notebook/July24
Friday, 24 July
Science Communication and Outreach
We posted an infographic about the uses of CaCO3 and why we had decided to work on making its production more carbon neutral. This was our first infographic with a design that matched our logo (we decided to keep the OpenDyslexic font from previous infographics):
We had a meeting with Jenny Rusk from the outreach office in Exeter, which works with schools and colleges in the South West to promote higher education. They mainly give talks about career options and applying to universities, but in the current pandemic they are looking for educational videos. We brainstormed some video ideas and most members of our team were enthusiastic about making a video explaining the different disciplines of science – including the disciplines you rarely hear about in high school such as biophysics.
Matthew wrote a full list of all the videos we were planning:
Pazzy started writing the script for a video about how the pandemic has affected our project.
Collaboration with Experts/Industry
We had an online meeting with Tim Gordon. We told him about our current Science Communication plans which included making a series of educational videos for high school students about synthetic biology or our project, and making a children's book about the basics of synthetic biology.
Tim liked our ideas and gave us the contact details of a few people who could help develop them, including Dr Sarah Nelms who made a children's book with her sister based on the topic of her PhD (microplastic pollution), and Ben Toulson who runs an Exeter-based podcast about marine life and science.
He explained to us that given Covid restrictions in the UK and the impossibility of giving any talks or having meetings in-person, the best way to build our audience would be to share our content with other organisations or academics who already have their own audiences.
We asked whether it was a better idea to target multiple audiences or prioritise just one and he said it is good to target multiple audiences however each thing we produce should be targeted to just one audience – if we try to make something that is appropriate for everybody, then it won't work for anybody.
Overall this let us know that we were on the right track, but that we should aim to share our content more with better established organisations.
Hydrogels and Modelling
Pazzy looked online into what mechanical properties hydrogels had to have in order to be effective in the application of bioprinting. He also began investigating coding a model which was able to take a certain "input" signal into a material and produce an output response (stress or strain).