Team:Aboa/Public Engagement
Education and Public Engagement
Our teams goals were to encourage local kids into pursuing their career dreams in science and technology and have fun while learning something new about synthetic biology. Also spreading knowledge about iGEM and synthetic biology was a big part of our project, as only a handful of people had even heard about iGEM in Turku before we started our very first team. Here we explain some of the challenges we saw in the society around us and how we approached these issues.
Education - The future of science
We wanted to simply inspire local kids into science and technology. Our home town Turku is small but student friendly city with plenty of bioscience businesses thriving. The problem in Turku is that other big cities in Finland attract high school and vocational students to study science and technology and Turku suffers from ”brain drain”.
In a little bit bigger picture - according to Microsoft’s research the average European girl loses interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) by the age of 15.
”The stubborn gender disparity in STEM fields has sparked important debates on the underlying reasons. Some attribute the gender disparity to social and infrastructural factors, lack of mentors and role models, and lack of awareness about what these fields offer in terms of educational and career opportunities” - Dr. Shalini Kesar, Associate Professor, Closing the STEM Gap, Microsoft
How these facts changed our approach? We wanted to inspire everyone into pursuing their career dreams and maybe spark some interest in STEM fields. Meanwhile we did some PR work for our beloved hometown and universities.
Keep reading to find out how we achieved our goals!
Team Aboa in collaboration with the LUMA Centre of Southwestern Finland joined SciCruise 2019. LUMA Centre is a network of Finnish universities and its main goal is to inspire and motivate children into mathematics and science - the same goal as with team Aboa. SciCruise is a science and technology festival held on a cruise ship from Turku Finland to Stockholm Sweden and back again. LUMA Centre joined forces on this cruise with Upsala University and on this cruise we had kids, students and teachers from both Finland and Sweden.
Team Aboa organized one of the many workshops there. We had a blast with the kids and grown ups extracting DNA from bananas with common and safe household chemicals. We wanted something easy and simple to demonstrate. We wanted to bring something so mundane in the lab for everyone to see and do it by themselves. The kids really loved seeing the dna with their own bare eyes and they had a lot of great questions. Our goal is to spark joy and show how fun science can be and I think we succeeded in that on this cruise.
-Susanna
Team Aboa reached out to a different kind of audience when deciding on what kinds of educational events we wanted to organize. As Susanna (me) is a leader at local girl scouts - Auran Tytöt, we wanted to create exciting science activities that would also be scout related. So we decided to teach Auran Tyttö’s Explorer scouts about hygiene while camping and sailing. In addition we made bacterial cultures from different kinds of places and objects around our meeting place.
First the girls got to make instructions in small groups, for leaders and younger scouts, on what they should pay attention to when cooking food for others, for example. All the groups made instructions for different situations and we went through those together and everyone was able to add their own ideas. After that we did our own tiny scientific test. We wanted to see how different steps of handwashing contribute to the cleanliness of the hands. We made the following cultures with the kids.
1. No handwashing at all
2. Using only hand sanitizer
3. Handwashing with water only, no drying
4. Handwashing with water, soap and drying
5. Handwashing with water, soap, drying and using hand sanitizer
In addition the girls got to take cultures from anywhere that they wanted. This was the most exciting part for them and the girls went absolutely full scientists on this one. We had samples from phones, headphones, water bottles, fridge, ground, air, mouth, ears, toilet and many more. We made almost 50 small agar plates during our small bacterial investigation. Team Aboa took the samples and grew them overnight at 37 degrees celsius and refrigerated them until the next week’s meeting.
Next week we brought the cultures for the girls to see and we took a closer look at the results. We noticed a huge difference in cleanliness with drying and not drying hands after washing. Also using just hand sanitizer turned out to be one of the most effective of hand washing.
The cultures we made from places and objects turned out very interesting too. For example the toilet wasn’t as dirty as we would have thought of at first.
We wanted to emphasize that not all bacteria are bad bacteria. We need bacteria to protect us and everywhere we go, there will be bacteria.
In conclusion, the girls vere super excited to do their own “research” and take samples. Also Team Aboa had great time and we enjoyed every minute with the kids.
-Susanna
As our last educational project we created a workshop for students at the local science oriented high school (TSYK). I graduated from this very high school in 2015 and I reached out to the biology teachers with an idea of organizing a small synthetic biology course and not much later we were already designing the content for the course. The course was aimed at the students who are at the same studying a biotechnology course at their school. This was fantastic as the students now got to do the lab work they are studying from books by themselves in real life.
During the summer our lab team had few struggles with some vectors we had and the idea for the lab work came from there. We had a real life problem and we wanted something fairly easy to do for high schoolers and the outcome was perfect! Our mission was to clone a gene from one vector to another.
More people signed in than we had room for, but we couldn’t say no for enthusiastic young scientists and decided to make room for everyone. On our first day out of four we went through the lab work plan together and made sure all the science jargon and the concepts such as transformation and ligation were understood. We made a small pipetting practice as many of the students had never used pipette before and went through the safety protocols. We also told about our studies and what kind of possibilities there are at the Finnish speaking University of Turku and the Swedish speaking Åbo Akademi.
On our second and third day, we took the students to the university where we have proper lab equipment. We gave the students the instructions and all the equipments and reagents. We helped out if there were any questions but we wanted to give them a chance to do steps on their own in pairs. This worked out very well and we helped mainly with using fancier equipment and pipetting on gels.
On our final fourth day, we took a closer look at our results and went through the whole work together and let the kids to explain what they did. The purpose of this workshop was to give an opportunity for the students to understand biotechnological methods on a deeper level and gain some lab work experience. At the same time we introduced them to the University of Turku and Department of Biochemistry. Many of the students expressed that they are considering a career in natural sciences and research. So we think we gave them a good glimpse into what kind of studies they can apply for in Turku and hopefully encouraged them into pursuing these career dreams.
-Susanna
Engagement - Marketing Synthetic Biology and iGEM
As the very first iGEM team from Turku and the second from Finland, our goal from the first meeting was to make iGEM into a tradition in Turku. In order to network and gain sponsors we went all out. We applied to every public event that was related to our topic. Everything from radio shows to symposiums. By the end of the iGEM year we were surprised that more and more people had already heard about us and reached out to us. We met so many wonderful people who helped us to get where we are today and that would not have happened if we didn’t try to connect with people by ourselves. Overall we think that raising awareness about iGEM and synthetic biology was achieved very well on different kinds of platforms and public events.
SHIFT Business Festival was held at the old Ruissalo boat yard on 29th and 30th of August and it gathered 3000 visitors together in the means of business and fun. We got our tickets straight from SHIFT without charge (Huge thanks for that!) and we saw our chances to make new connections in our area!
We enjoyed listening to interesting people in a beautiful venue and had private meetings with people in our field. Setting up a meeting was super easy with Brella application. With Brella one can arrange a meeting with suggesting a time and then the person you want to meet eighter accepts or declines one's invitation. Easy!
After some struggles we found the Tech Talent Lounge by Talent Turku and FiTech. There we met a lot of artificial intelligence gurus. Even though we are from completely different fields, it was nice to share and hear about our fields of studies.
As the night fell, there was a dance show including lights and great music. We continued making connections in the dark of the night with some beverages..
The second day of SHIFT was less intense and more casual. We enjoyed great food in the beautiful venue and solved CGI's cyber safety escape room quickly. Actually we were the second best in the whole festival! Hopefully our next team will get this opportunity aswell.
-Fanni
As autumn came and the new semester started, it was time for us to start looking into iGEM 2020 and a possible team. We talked, agreed and went to the opening carnival of Turku University on Tuesday the 5th of September. It was a sunny day, filled with music, speeches and freshmen, eager to start studying and to understand everything that the university had to offer.
We had a stand, where we had printed out flyers, business cards and candy to attract possible persons of interest. At first we did not have a lot of visitors, but as the carnival progressed, people started to become interested in us. We met a lot of different people, talked about possible ideas, new ways of doing things and gave our contact information to possible team participants for the next year. We learned that a lot of students have never heard of iGEM, but were interested to learn more and see the possibilities that came with it.
When the carnival ended, we had a positive feeling as a team, that we can start a tradition here in Turku University and Åbo Akademi University. The team shall as this year, in the future also contain multiple faculties and be bilingual.
-Gustav
We hosted a radio show about synthetic biology and iGEM in the beginning of the semester. We talked about our project and told our listeners what goes into doing a teamproject like this, and to be honest, we had the time of our life!
The story of the show began when one of us found out that the internet-based interdisciplinary radio of our school would be live for a couple of days in september. Usually this radio that is geared toward students in particular would only do podcasts during springtime to celebrate the first of May for two weeks. However, this year the producers decided that they would air a special autumn show called SYSSYRADIO (syssy being a slang word derived from the Finnish word “syksy” that means autumn). Immediately we understood that this was an opportunity for us to promote our project and iGEM. We are after all the first iGEM team from Turku, and as of yet we have flown more so under the radar. So, we decided that four members from our team should go for it!
We had one of the team members apply our group for the show, and soon after we were asked to come to their “office” to shoot some pictures and commercials for the promotion of the material that was going to be featured. The photoshoot went really well and by the end of it we had fondly named our group “labraråtat”, which pretty much translates to laboratory rats with a slight funny twist to it with the addition of a Swedish “o”-letter. The show that we would be hosting was titled “synthetic biology for dummies”. After roughly a week or so, we got our schedule. Our segment of the show would be broadcasted on the third of September from 2pm to 4pm.
The day finally arrived and we were all very excited. Being in the studio and speaking in front the mic wasn’t something familiar to us at all. For the first couple of minutes that we spent dishing out our introductions, we were so nervous that all our hands were collectively shaking. It felt like no matter what we did, our palms continuously kept on producing more sweat. But as the first sentences were said out loud, we quickly came to the realization that this wouldn’t be so bad after all. It wouldn’t be the death of anyone if a few mistaken sentences were uttered out loud because of nervousness.
So the initial stress and wrecked nerves dissipated quite fast, and we finally had our thoughts in order about the things we wanted to discuss on air. First we wanted to shed light on the key questions and concepts; who exactly are we, what on earth is iGEM and to give our listeners a crash course on synthetic biology. In the end we did just that, and as a cherry on top we had time to brush up on topics such as GMO-products and even answer some comments from our listeners. This was all made possible due to the show having an accessible online chat that displayed all messages sent in real time.
Overall the broadcast went wonderfully. According to the radio shows statistics, we were successfully able to reach around 90 different stations that were listening in on us, and about 13 of those stations belonged to different student clubs, so in the end we reached about 300 people with our show.
The radio show was a brilliant way to spread awareness of our project and to tell people more about synthetic biology in an interesting setting to the students here in Turku. On top of that, this was a very unique and great experience we got to be in together and our broadcast garnered some amazing responses.
-Jutta
Earlier this autumn the European bioindustry umbrella organisation called EuropaBio hosted an annual European Biotechnology Week. It took place from the 23rd to the 29th of September 2019, and our iGEM team participated in organizing the event. In Finland, the Biotechnology Week is coordinated by the Finnish Biotechnology Association (FIB). Our involvement in this project began when we were invited by our counterpart down South, the iGEM-team Aalto-Helsinki, to host a laboratory demonstration in Otaniemi. We were part of the opening ceremony of BioGarage, and this was all included in the Biotechnology Week. BioGarage is a new research based innovation: a new laboratory targeted towards those who have an idea that includes some laboratory work that can’t be otherwise executed.
The entire planning process for this event began in July 2019. We had a few Skype meetings with Aalto-Helsinki where we decided on what was going to happen during the event. We came to the conclusion that our part would include an educational video about immunoassays that Aboa writes and Aalto-Helsinki implements. That was a natural choice for us, as we know a lot about immunoassays and can cover the theory part, whereas Aalto-Helsinki was able to provide us with the design part, as they had the skills necessary to provide us with an animation and all other aspects that came with it. In addition to that, as mentioned earlier, we would take a part in opening ceremony of BioGarage. Together with Aalto-Helsinki we wrote down questions for an internet based Kahoot quiz competition and prepared a demonstration for showcasing the new laboratory. Then as a cherry on top we had a short speech for the audience at the event about iGEM and and our shared topics together with Aalto-Helsinki.
Our iGEM team participated in a pitching competition that was also a separate event during the Biotechnology Week. Our pitching masters Susanna and Pyry were truly on fire when they gave a passionate short speech about our project, which turned out to be good practise for the Giant Jamboree! Unfortunately our team didn’t emerge victorious out of the competition as the level of the competition was quite high and pitching was something we weren’t intimately familiar with. We all agree on the fact that the real winner of the competition truly was the inspiring pitch about eye surgeries.
On Friday the 27th of September, we arrived as planned to the main area of the event in Otaniemi. In the very early stages of the event we were told that the crowd we would be in front of would most likely consist of only families with children. But when we arrived on the scene we quickly realized that there wouldn’t be any families, and that there would rather only be expensively dressed business men. The laboratory demo we had prepared was extracting DNA from the cells of our mouth that are presented in our saliva. So business men had to spit for their life! Many of the guests were from biotech fields and have done DNA extractions in a laboratory multiple times before but some of the guests had never even stepped into a laboratory before and they especially had great fun looking at their own DNA inside of a test tube. We met some really interesting people there, including a current employee of iGEM and an old iGEM team member.
-Jutta
BioTreffit & Health Tuesday
Biotreffit & Health Tuesday is a local networking event hosted every month’s first Tuesday by Turku Business Region. It gathers local bioscience businesses and other instances working in the same field for a common breakfast to connect and hear what others have been working on! Event is held in the heart of Turku startup world at Turku SparkUp in Turku Science Park.
This time the topic of the morning was bedside testing and medical devices. Our office neighbor and event’s main host Hanna Halme invited us there to pitch our idea and tell more about iGEM. Event was supposed to start with live stream from similar event in Helsinki as there was visiting speakers from Helsinki University Hospital and GE Healthcare. But as usual, technology failed, and we had no audio from the Capital.
Due to unfortunate events, our turn came earlier. We started by telling the audience what the iGEM competition is and what different things students must complete in order to succeed in the competition. There we moved on to our research topic: “Revolutionizing immunodiagnostics with Expanded Genetic Code”.
After the presentation we got quite a lot of questions about our idea from people presenting local diagnostics companies and we even got the attention of one headhunter looking for new projects for SynBio Powerhouse of Technical Research Centre of Finland.
- Riku