Team:ACIBADEM ISTANBUL/Public Engagement
Education & Public Engagement
Education and public engagement activities are one of the most important aspects of VenomXL since people usually have prejudice and doubts before using a newly developed product. This is why we worked hard on making sure that people would entirely understand our project and its global impact. To achieve this goal, we informed people with methods such as presentations, surveys, public interviews and slideshows. These public engagements resulted in people being enlightened and us potentially finding new scientifically-curious minds, which was one of our main goals. We wanted to inspire the upcoming generation to learn about synthetic biology, and we believe that our presentation about our project to students of the Esayan High School in Istanbul was impactful as we received positive feedback. We were delighted to see that people are interested in our topic and that our hard work and dedication is recognized by the public.
Street Interview
We have done an interview with many different people from various backgrounds, cultures and knowledge in order to really engage with not only our neighbourhood but with strangers and people roaming in the streets of our city. We prepared questions concerning poisonings and venomous snake bites which uncloaked many different answers some of which were correct and some that were very far from the correct answers. In all these cases we provided the factual and correct answers of all of our questions aiming to teach the actual techniques to solve the problems we have given them. We strove to raise their awareness and get rid of the misunderstandings underlying our topic of snakebites.
Presentation at Esayan Armenian Middle School
Moreover, we thought that this interaction with the public that consisted of mostly older people wasn’t enough to attain our goal of informing the world of our topic so we arranged a presentation at a school, Esayan Armenian Middle School,to make known the knowledge of synthetic biology and iGEM, meantime, to understand the current situation of education about biology in middle schools and also, thinking that this would help us to reach a future with further knowledge on the crucial issue of snakebites. After our presentation, our team answered the audience’s questions and we explained our practices to enlighten our audience and improve their comprehension, avoiding further ignorance and acquiring more scientific curiosity.
Presentation at Notre Dame de Sion French High School
After giving a presentation to students around our age, we decided to arrange one more presentation to our current professors and teachers in our school about the issue and the solution underlying our project topic. This discussion has acquainted us little details we need to improve and also encouraged us about our project. They were very impressed with our presentation, therefore decided to collaborate with us and project were showcased on the school’s official website. We also emailed a survey about poison, venom and synthetic biology to all the students of the school.
Presentations at
Koç High School,
Zonguldak Ereğli Science High School and
Okyanus College Istanbul:
Our mentors hosted presentations about a general overview of iGEM and synthetic biology, informing young students about the competition and the potential projects they could work on.