Team:Rotterdam HR/PublicEngagement

iGEM Rotterdam HR 2019

Public Engagement

Roast

19 March 2019

Although this brings to mind a warm Sunday roast, we cooked up a different kind of roast. We, millennials, now dub ‘roasting’ as a manner to humorously criticize or wear down an idea. We began with streamlining our ideas through the iGEM Squeeze, which we have created and collaborated with. Afterwards, left with 5 major project ideas, we called upon a panel of lecturers, professionals, synbio enthusiasts and other students, to “roast” us on our project ideas.

The roast was the turning point of our project, as we had a clearer perception of what our audience favoured, their critical questions about the feasibility and requirements, the general knowledge surrounding the topic as well as the need for it in today’s society. Ultimately, the decision wasn’t easy, but we settled on the concept of a “Universal Assay”, from which the pilot version named the ‘Health Risk Detection Kit’ was born.

NBC-19

22 May 2019

We are thankful that we had the chance to stand and present our project at the Netherlands Biotechnology Congress (NBC). This was the first time that we got to meet the other Dutch teams and to learn about their amazing projects! We learned a lot from this day and received some great advice.







High school presentation and instruction class


22-24 May 2019

As students, we are equally ambassadors of our University and thereby have the opportunity to share our passion for our programs. During a visit from the Scala Rietvelden High School, students from the Biology track gave a presentation on the subject and additional information about the course study; Biology and Medical Laboratory Research. Of course, we apprised the prospective students about the possibility to partake in amazing projects at our university, such as iGEM! and consequently we assumed the role of ambassadors of iGEM. But our education goals did not stop in their class room:





A few lucky students even got the chance to go to our school to get an instruction class from our team member Anass. By inviting them over to 'the next level of education' we hope to have helped them with their choice of study, as well as created awareness of health- and environmental risks.








Future Flux Festival

4 July 2019

Our team was present amongst other creative and pioneering designs of the Future Flux Festival at RDM (Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij - Rotterdam Dry Dock Company) in Rotterdam; a festival providing an amazing platform for new developments in the fields of technology and innovation, where we were privileged to showcase HRDK prototype to the public. We engaged and introduced our concept to many and spread the word about iGEM.








Baking Sale

30 August 2019

As part of our outreach’s, we decided to do a baking sale during the introduction week of the new students this year. This way we were able to introduce the students to iGEM in the hope that they want to join in the future. An extra reason why we did this was because of the extra money we could collect with this.
During the picnic itself, we sold a decent amount of food, but we were still left with a lot. At the picnic, there were also some teachers who bought brownies, and after we came back to school with so much food left it went quickly. Some of the teachers loved it so much that they wanted to take some home with them, which sparked other teachers to do the same, and before we knew it everything was gone. The all-over experience was very fun and delicious.