Team:The Tech Museum/Community

Community Engagement

As a museum team, we were excited use our iGEM project to explore novel activities to excite and educate the public. Can we develop a museum exhibit that promotes public engagement in and understanding of synthetic biology through a hands-on engineering of bacteria and data collection experience?

With those goals in mind, an in important part of our development process was therefore prototyping. We actively tested out components of our exhibit with diverse audiences, from museum staff and educators to visitors, to get as much feedback as possible.

During the weeks that we had our exhibit on the museum floor doing data collection, we interacted with many people during their visits to the Tech Museum of Innovation. Altogether, we collected data with visitors from 61 individual experiments analyzed a total of 2674 colonies of bacteria. Many of these experiments were done with larger families or friend groups, so the actual number of people we directly interacted with was much larger.

In an effort to further engage the general public, inspire curiosity about synthetic biology, and expand general familiarity with the subject, we also created a video (on Home page) and written summary (link below) of our project aimed at a general audience.

Executive Summary