Team:UofUppsala/Education
Education
The ability to communicate science is one of the most important roles of a scientist. In this page you can read about our educational efforts.
Our role, as a part of Human Practices, has been to educate about synthetic biology and GMO in general, as well as sharing details about application and our project. Synthetic biology and GMO is still a new and controversial field, which is why we believe that educating people about this subject is an important responsibility. It was also a great opportunity to practice presenting and talking about science with both scientists and nonscientists alike. Through public engagement, we have been able to spark interest in this field, increase general knowledge, and find support for our project!
Science it Out!
The aim of our collaboration program Science it Out! was to connect scientists of all levels, within and outside of iGEM to discuss and share our ideas and experiences. We also promoted Science it out on our social media to encourage the general public to partake.
In the Coffee Room
In our first event in this series we hosted In the Coffee Room. We discussed and presented our ideas together with the Uppsala SensUs team. SensUs is an annual competition where the teams develop biosensors. This year the Uppsala SensUs team aimed to develop a biosensor capable of quantifying a drug that counteracts epilepsy. Since our idea is also to develop a biosensor the discussion gave both teams insight on different types of biosensors.
Our sponsor and advisor for this event was The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT Health). EIT is an organization aimed to support the healthcare sector by creating an optimal environment for innovation. This is achieved by connecting research, education and business. In our event they presented what they do and what student engagements they offer.
From Paper to Reality
For the second event in this series, our team arranged the virtual symposium From Paper to Reality, focusing on product development and how to sucessfully promote one's product and idea. We had the pleasure of collaborating with the iGEM teams Aalto-Helsinki and Stockholm.
The first speaker of the day was the founder of the consulting company Greendesk, Kristian Jelse who is an expert in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). His work consists of supporting companies in understanding, calculating and communicating the environmental footprint of their products. The presentation was followed by a discussion on applying LCA on our different projects.
Charlie Carpene from EIT Health held an introductory lecture on prototyping. He provided us with insight on the benefits of prototyping and different ways to go about prototyping software and hardware.
A recorded Q&A session with representatives from Superior Silica was held. Superior Silica is an American company leading technology in their field, creating silica beads with high precision. The participating teams had the opportunity to ask questions relating to the themes:
- Technology
- Scale-up: Moving from a procedure to lab scale to commercial scale production
- Challenges of being a startup in the chemical/material science industry
The symposium was concluded with a presentation held by our own team in project pitching inspired by Erik Tosterud from Drivhuset. Drivhuset, is an organization located in several cities in Sweden, amongst them Uppsala, which aims to support and develop startups by providing them with necessary tools such as guidance, education and creating a network.
Lectures and Events
To spread knowledge about the iGEM competition and synthetic biology, we organized lectures and events for fellow students in Sweden and Brazil. However, we did not forget about expanding our own horizons, we also participated in the Nordic iGEM Conference and Nordic Ethics Workshop with other iGEM teams. You can read more details about these events on the Collaborations page.
Introduction to Synthetic Biology
Introduction to Synthetic Biology was an opportunity for our team to share a little bit about what iGEM is all about. This lecture was given virtually by one of our team members to approximately 40 Biology students at Fluminense Federal University (Universidade Federal Fluminense - UFF, Niterói/Brazil) at the beginning of the 2020 autumn semester, covering the basics of synthetic biology by introducing the concept of a cellular biosensor as well as previous iGEM projects. As UFF has never taken part in the iGEM competition, this lecture was important to spark the students’ interest in the area and a great opportunity to challenge them into creating their own synthetic biology projects.
STING Festivalen
STING festival is an annual fair, where first-year students of engineering and natural sciences are introduced to associations at Uppsala University, including iGEM Uppsala Association. The festival took place despite the current coronavirus pandemic, and was made possible thanks to the additional measures deployed to ensure the safety of all participants. While traditionally it is a one-day festival, this year the event was spread over a period of two days and only a small number of students were allowed into the area. We had a stand where we handed out flyers and talked about iGEM and synthetic biology over a cup of coffee with students from many different programs. For us, it was a great opportunity to practice presenting our project to students with minimal background knowledge and facing the challenge of presenting without the use of PowerPoint! Hopefully, we managed to make students curious about synthetic biology and we will see some of them in the future iGEM Uppsala teams!
SynBio Hour 2020
SynBio Hour is an annual lunch event hosted by iGEM Uppsala. This year's event will take place in virtual form, where we present our project to university students. Not only will we practice our presentation skills, but the event will be an opportunity to promote iGEM as a great and unique learning experience!
Educational Materials
We did not stop at organizing events and lectures in order to spread useful information, we also created a couple of videos focused on rules and safety in the lab, two handbooks, and a pamphlet dedicated to the problem of tuberculosis.
Biosafety Videos
It's always more fun to learn in a creative and interactive way, so we decided to make informative but goofy biosafety videos about Uppsalas’s Biomedical Center waste and fire safety rules, general lab rules, and corona handling rules. These videos can be used for educating students before they start to work in the lab. Have a look at them!
iGEM Type IIS Standard Guide
In the past few years, efficient cloning techniques based on the Type IIS restriction enzymes were created. Without any tradition of this cloning techniques in iGEM Uppsala, we decided to investigate, use and improve an iGEM Type IIS cloning Standard, which was released in 2019! We collected valuable experience, created and tested new parts such as dummies or low-copy number backbones and we described everything in the iGEM Type IIS Standard Guide.
Bacillus subtilis Handbook
One of the experimental routes of developing a great biosensor led us to working with Bacillus subtilis. This less common synthetic biology chassi is not always as easy to handle and different rules apply when compared to working with Escherichia coli. To share our knowledge and experiences, we collaborated with iGEM team Generation Mendel (from Brno University, Czech Republic) and summarized useful learning outcomes in the Bacillus subtilis handbook.
TB Pamphlet
We strived to create a biosensor for universal protein detection. Such a biosensor can potentially target a wide range of biomarkers and thus be applied in many different areas. As a potential target for the use of our biosensor in pathogen detection, we chose an ancient disease which is, after thousand years, still threatening humanity - tuberculosis. Read about what we learned in our pamphlet!
Platforms
Platforms are an effective way of informing, collaborating and gaining support for our project. We used social media platforms, the fundraising platform GoFundMe, and JOGL.
Social Media
An important tool for communication has been our social media platforms, especially in the pandemic situation this year. Through social media we have showcased information about our team members, updates about our project progress, informed about our events, and even found new sponsors and collaboration partners! You are welcome to check our profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and Youtube.
JOGL
Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) is a platform for collaborative task solving that connects people, organizations, companies, academic labs to develop solutions to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) defined by the United Nations. We are especially thankful for finding Xiguo on JOGL, who joined our team later to help us with the modeling aspect of the project. You can visit our profile on JOGL here.
GoFundMe
Fundraising is one of the challenging aspects of the iGEM competition, and we decided to face this challenge. We made an informative video about our project and uploaded it on the GoFundMe website. Our hope was to gaining monetary support and shed light on our project. We managed to raise 400€! Have a look at the video here!
Interviews and Articles
We did not limit ourselves to our own platforms, we were also interviewed by the organization BioNyfiken and we thought that getting interviewed for an article for the newspaper TECHNA would be even more effective to reach out to the public.
BioNyfiken
BioNyfiken is an organization dedicated to creating a network of biohackers centered in Sweden, and now they have expanded to Uppsala. Their aim is to educate the general public on topics relating to synthetic biology by creating workshops, talks and experiments. We were interviewed by a representative of the organization and had the opportunity to talk about who we are and our project. Have a look at the interview here!
TECHNA
TECHNA is the newspaper of UTN (Uppsala teknolog- och naturvetarkår), which is the student union of all the science and engineering programs of Uppsala University. We were interviewed for an article about iGEM and our project in an issue of the TECHNA newspaper, to spark an interest in synthetic biology and encourage Uppsala’s science and engineering students to apply for iGEM next year. You can find the article on this page in the fourth issue of 2020.