Team:TU Munich/Human Practice/Information Day

Background Information

Text. On the Conference in Berlin held by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research all German iGEM Teams agreed on an Action Day, Date: 25th of August. The idea behind this day was to raise awareness of the competition and Syntethic Biology all over the country. Our team wrote a press release for all other teams. Explaining SynBio and the BioBrick principle. If you unsderstand German you can read it further down on this side. On the 25th we had an information booth in the city center of Munich, direchtly at the Karlsplatz. We shared this booth with the other Munich iGEM team, the LMU.

What we did

On our booth we had two booklets from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. One with the title "Da ist Biotechnologie drin" (There is biotechnology inside) and "Weiße Biotechnology" (White biotechnology). Besides that our team also made a three pages booklet where the iGEM competition and the two project were presented and explained. For the kids we had Lego bricks to explain the idea behind standardized bricks. With this tool we raised the awareness of the kids and had something to explain it with easier. Last but not least we told them of our painting competition.

Conclusion

All in all the booth was a raving success. Our place directly at the beginning of the pedestrian area was great becuase a lot of people passed our booth. We stood there for four hours on a sunny day and it was never boring. Our project rose awarness rather easily, because the topic "beer" is a good starting point for a short discussion. The people know about it, it is comprehensible and therefore cathpenny. The oportunity to talk with one of us and let the children paint in the meantime was a convincing concept. We did our best and are convincced that almost everybody who talked with us on the 25th of August at least understood the concept of BioBricks and the analogy with the Lego Brick. All in all it was fun for us and the pedestrians, as you can see on our pictures.

Children painting contest illustrating synthetic biology

The idea behind the painting contest was to explain Synthetic Biology to kids in a rather simple way. It was explained that they can transfer a feature from one animal to another animal to create a completely new one. Then we had a short talk about our project and told them that we are doing exactly the same thing, but with smaller organisms and mostly features from plants. In the end there was a comparison between the features and a lego brick, so that it got clearer that really everything can be combined with everything with our competion. After that they got a lego brick as a present and started peinting. To have an impulsion the kids could win 10 tickets to the "Tierpark Hellabrunn", the zoo in Munich.

The winning pictures were: