Team:FCB-UANL/Education
Mexico is a country where most of the population doesn’t know the importance of science. Thus, it is very important for us to raise awareness about the applications of synthetic biology, so we can increase people’s trust and, on an expected long-term effect, government support for scientific research. Through some educational activities, we taught people about science, forestal ecosystems, and wildfires.
This year, we tried to adapt ourselves to online education. Wondering how we could convey the importance of nature as well as science, Dana la rana was born. Dana la rana (Dana the frog) is our pet, she’s a Leptodactylidae frog (the same family whose bubble nests inspired our foam). We made a series of short videos where Dana talks about science, biotechnology applications, and fire safety intending to reach a young public.
People’s integrity when experiencing a fire is a problem that has been little studied. That’s why we decided to delve deeper into the subject and get to know better this important part of the problem. We had an interview with Conductual Psychologist José Andrés Rivas Lozano, who guided us, and told us the importance of raising awareness about it.
With Psychologist Andres’ help, we wrote down an article for the magazine Ciencia UANL. It is called “Ansiedad: la conducta oculta durante desastres naturales” (Anxiety: the hidden behavior during natural disasters), and its objective is to raise awareness and invite readers to investigate further and take care of their mental health. Now, the article has been accepted, and it’s going to be released in next months’ publications.
Estación Meiquer is a mexican educational company that aims to introduce children to science. Along with the Gliksys (TecMonterrey_Gdl) team, we created an activity manual about microbiology. All activities had an empirical approach, and they had the objective of encouraging critical thinking in kids. The activity we developed has the objective of introducing the concept of yeasts and their industrial and biotechnological importance.
OUTREACH
People’s lack of knowledge about synbio and biotechnology is one of the most important problems we face nowadays. Worried by that, we tried to contribute with some activities to get people to know more about science and its importance.
Biotec Latina is an initiative that intends to integrate biotechnology communities, groups and organizations from Latin America with the goal of breaking out the Spanish-Portuguese barrier in the region, in order to create a space for biotechnologists and related professionals. It is very important for us due to the lack of initiatives like this in our region.
We have participated as part of the Cultural Exchange Committee, where we organize activities about science and culture with the aim of reaching people both involved and not involved in science.
We organized the first-ever iGEM Hispanamerican Meetup. We had speakers and assistants from iGEM HQ and After iGEM, as well as PIs, advisors and iGEM alumni, using platforms such as Zoom, Facebook live, Hopin, and Jackbox Party. All the conferences are available on YouTube, as a way to contribute for future teams. More details about this meetup are explained in our collaboration section. The following video recopilates some of the opinions about how iGEM has change the life of its participants.
We organized the activity “iGEMbox party” in the iGEM Opening Weekend Festival, as our closure for the Meetup iGEM Hispam 2020. In this activity, we used Zoom’s breakout rooms to make teams and play Quiplash online, using Hopin platform for the transmission; the goal was to create the funniest answers for some questions about iGEM.
Along with Latin American teams, we organized the activity “Who wants to be an iGEMer?” as part of the Global Meetup activities where participants answered questions about iGEM and synbio general concepts. Using zoom, we made teams, where we had participants from after iGEM, iGEM HQ and teams all around the world.
CONFERENCES
Since our project is one of a kind, we took as many opportunities as we could to share what SynBio means for us, as well as what iGEM does, not only in our university, but also in many different places around the world.
We organized many conferences for our university’s students, with the objective of getting them involved in SynBio and offering the tools to participate in iGEM in the near future. However, all the things said in the presentations could help them in any scientific project they want to develop.
We were invited to give a pitch of our project, along with some other teams, for many iGEM meetups organized through the season. We learned about other team’s amazing projects and answered some questions from both experts and general audience about ours, which helped us to improve our project presentation.
Our project’s pitch was presented with our sponsors, where we had the opportunity to know them better, and answer some of the expert’s questions.
We made a project presentation through a live transmission at Terra Magazine Facebook page. We talked about synthetic biology in general, using our project as an example of every step you have to do when developing a project. We also answered some questions of the audience with the objective of teaching about synbio, our project and iGEM.
We presented the conference “Synthetic Biology to fight wildfires” for the Synthetic Biology Club from UNILA University. There we talked about synthetic biology and iGEM in general, since UNILA’s team is going to participate next year. We could hear some interesting opinions from UNILA’s members and their instructor about our project We also gave them advice about an iGEM team’s organization.