Representing iGEM and Synthetic Biology at the MakerFaire Hannover

On July 4th-7th, Florian, René and Michael joined Ansgar on a trip to the [http://makerfairehannover.com/ MakerFaire Hannover 2014].

The MakerFaire is an exhibition with things that people built on their own using readily available tools. Dozens of 3D printers and microcontrollers can be examined, and there are a lot of devices visitors can interact with. Among the fire-spitting dragon, our OD and fluorescence measurement devices attracted a lot of attention. We spoke with hundreds of visitors and had a lot of interesting conversations.

Saturday evening, Carsten Ludwig from the iGEM Team Braunschweig visited us. We showed him the most fascinating stands and afterwards went to the city to walk the [http://www.roterfaden-hannover.de/ Red Thread of Hannover], a track going past 36 very central tourist attractions as e.g. the roofless church.

On this quick sightseeing trip we took a nice panorama of the Aegidienkirche.

When the #NEDCRC soccer game started, we settled for some hamburgers, fermentation broth and exchanged funny stories about our lab experience.

On Saturday, the run on our stand had been so enormous that we had to improvise and print new flyers at our hostel for Sunday, the second and last day of the fair. Just like the day before, a lot of people showed interest in our stand, and especially René passionately demonstrated our devices and informed about synthetic biology as well as our project Cellock Holmes.

At about midday, Manuel, advisor of Team Bielefeld, visited us and got to experience our measurement device, too.

When we left Hannover Monday morning, we decided to stop by in Bielefeld to meet the rest of their team. This way they, too, got to test our OD and fluorescence measurement device and we got to eat some delicious ribes cake :)

Five hours later, we left the Bielefeld team to eat some incredibly spicy pizza and continued our journey back home to Aachen. On the autobahn, we took the time to write down all experiences and things we learned to share them with our team in the coming days.

tl;dr: We had an awesome trip to the MakerFaire Hannover, presented our devices to hundreds of people and met the teams Braunschweig and Bielefeld.

If you like to see more about our weekend have a look at the following gallery =)

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