Realization

The poster to describe our project, which we presented at Street Science.

In Bielefeld we organized the booth in cooperation with [http://www.bielefeld-marketing.de/de/index.html Bielefeld Marketing]. We had prepared a lot of different things. For example a microscope to have a look on microorganisms and “wanted poster” for the organisms. For kids we had organized pipettes and lab coats to feel like scientists. They could pipet colored water and merge it, to see how colors change. We also held small competitions: jump roping with ropes made of reaction tubes and filling up pipette tip boxes as fast as possible. The kids could win golden Bluecaps filled with sweets and we made sure they won all the time. For the adult visitors we presented posters to understand our project and our approach and for everyone we had planned an experiment for DNA extraction. For our DNA extraction we took an experiment from [http://openwetware.org/wiki/IGEM_Outreach:Activities CommunityBricks] and modified it. We wanted our common day to be multimedial, so we showed a video about [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD5uNAMbDaQ Synthetic Biology] (taken from [http://technyou.edu.au/fun-stuff/videos/video-transcripts/ TechNyou]. Credits to the iGEM Team from Bonn for translating, thank you. Click [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bykAeGMMosI here] to watch the video in german. Kevin also made a short video about plenty of different microorganisms, showing impressive electromicroscopic pictures (pictures were taken from [http://www.wikipedia.org/ wikipedia] and from working groups of our university. Of course we wanted to know what people thought about our common day. Did they understand our goals and how was their opinion? Here you can read more about the evaluation of the feedback.

Conclusion

Our poster to illustrate the development of biology to Synthetic Biology.

The SynBioDay - StreetScience was a great success. Everything from organization to realization worked just find. We could talk to a lot of people about Synthetic Biology and our project and they gave us a positive feedback. People were interested and fascinated by our project. They not only unterstood our goals, but also found it helpful, innovative and informative. We answered nearly all their questions and also got several applications for internships, which we sadly could not accept. The visitors acknowledged our collaboration with the iGEM team from SDU-Denmark and everyone was impressed how easy it is to extract DNA and that it is possible to “see” DNA. Especially the kids amazed and happy to take home their self-extracted fruit DNA. Looking at microorganisms through the microscope was fascinationg for kids and adults and everyone had a lot of fun. The possibility of Synthetic Biology to add new characteristics to microorganisms did not frighten the people, but led to an unterstanding of this new field of science and its potential applications.

We did a survey to have an evaluation about our booth and about possible errors. Here you can find the results.

Have you noticed that the picture on the top is a slider? Feel free to take a look at our picture gallery.

Additionals

The poster of the iGEM team SDU-Denmark, which the danish iGEM team presented at Street Science.

• With our SynBioDay - Street Science we could generate publicity. Here you can find the links to the two press articles by [Link Neue Westfälische] and by [Link WESTFALEN-BLATT].
• In the box below you can find the instructions for the extraction of fruit DNA, taken and modified from [http://openwetware.org/wiki/IGEM_Outreach CommunityBricks].

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