Strategy - Inspiring Instead of Lecturing

The 2014 DTU iGEM team is a group of students with very different personalities and backgrounds, but one of the main factors that makes our team such a strong, dynamic unit is a great mutual interest in synthetic biology and the opportunities in this exciting field. Our curiosity and individual involvement in the field made each of us join the iGEM team of this year and thereby brought us together. As a team and as individuals we have a natural urge to spread our interest and enthusiasm, and we are eager to inspire other people to get involved in the same fascinating area. In order to do so, during the project period, we arranged different initiatives for outreach, focusing on the iGEM competition in general as well as project-specific subjects.

Communication Strategy

In order to coordinate our outreach initiatives and thus make the work more efficient and coherent, we started out by defining a general strategy for our Policies and Practices work. We believe that inspiration is an essential step towards getting people interested and involved in the world of synthetic biology - therefore we have emphasised the importance of inspiration as a necessary supplement to education. Thus, our focus has been to inspire people with help from great iGEM and other synthetic biology examples as well as the great future potential of synthetic biology rather than lecturing them. We believe that people are more likely to search for advanced information on a topic if they feel inspired. Our Policy and Practices initiatives do therefore not primarily focus on passing on hardcore theory or technical knowledge to other people, but on a more abstract and inspirational level.

Target Group - Young Students, the Professors of Tomorrow

To optimise the outcome of our outreach initiatives we have specified a reachable target group among the Danish population on whom we would have our focus. Based on our strategy, we intended to define a group of people, who already had an interest within biology or related fields. This would allow inspiration on a higher level with more advanced and interesting examples. Additionally we preferred a group that did not have heavy limitations caused by specialised knowledge on what had been seen before and what would be realistic to do now or in the near future.

Based on our aforementioned criteria we narrowed our target group to be composed of ‘students’. However, ‘students’ are still a very diverse group. As illustrated in Figure 1, students look differently on new biological topics depending on how far they are in their education and how much prior knowledge they have within their field. When a student starts in lower secondary school, he or she is generally ignorant regarding biology but is easily influenced. As the level of education increases the individuals are taught about biology and related topics. At the time a student reaches university, he or she has to chose a field of interest. Depending on this choice the student either limits or enhances his/hers possibilities to work within synthetic biology (Figure 1), making this pre-university segment of students a nice starting point for our target group.

As students holding a bachelor degree within biotechnology our minds are already limited by our knowledge about what have already been done and what is realistic. Younger students with a basic knowledge of biology are more capable of dreaming of the huge potential of synthetic biology without being restricted by these kinds of limitations. This allows for a creative mindset enabling them to come up with new applications that can broaden our horizon. They just need to be inspired - the foundation of our strategy.

Figure 1: Relevant characteristics and categorisation of potential target groups.

To reach students in upper secondary school who are able to understand the basic concepts behind synthetic biology and students with an extraordinary enthusiasm within this field, we chose to focus on elite students. The trend in the Danish society towards talent development within the educational sector has led to an increase of science camps for talented students within all scientific fields and biotechnology is no exception.

Based on the above mentioned theory and strategy, we further narrowed down our segment of interest to concerning only talented biology-oriented students currently in upper secondary school. Our vision was to plant a seed of inspiration for synthetic biology in these young people and influence their choice of future career - not by lecturing them what to do, but by inspiring and letting them make their own choice.

Specific Activities

In our outreach initiatives we have taken advantage of different talent programmes in Denmark in order to reach students from our target group, able to understand the complexity and potential of synthetic biology. These include Science Talents at the Mærsk Science Center and Academy for Talented Young Students - one of the largets operators for talent development of students from upper secondary school in Denmark.

Our outreach initiatives were diverse within the set frame and involved participation in a documentary movie, conduction of workshops and participation in conferences among others. Each of the activities are described in further details at our achievement page for Policy and Practices.

In addition to the target-group specific initiatives, we prepared and hosted a BioBrick Workshop in the spring for the Danish iGEM teams, in order to provide a good foundation for each of the teams to start their experimental work in the summer. A description of the BioBrick Workshop and the outcome can be found here.