Perfecting everything and admiring our wiki which is totally done at this point. All's well, we can just relax before the Jamboree.

We meet the event manager and event organizer of Heureka and come up with a synthetic biology weekend workshop we could organize in Spring.

They were very excited about us and everything we had to show and tell. They said that this is a perfect match from them and all the simulations, games, pictures fit perfectly into the workshop.

We hope to inspire young people to study synthetic biology in the future and let the older people know it exists. This will also be a perfect opportunity for the next year's iGEM Team to get involved and organize something together.

Because chimera is a term in gene techonology and mythology, Laura decided that drawing a chimera for each member based on the animals they choose would be a cool idea.

We agreed. Here's Otto.

We get the idea of explaining synthetic biology as turning bacteria into superheroes from a one-on-one with ???. We start working on a new pitch ased on that. Pietu finishes the pitch the next day and presents it at Summer of Startups. It seems to go over very well. People finally understand what we are doing.

It has been on the help page for a while. We only noticed it now.

We also wrote a thing for the Community page and got them featured on there.

Also new pictures. Like a new group photo.

Tons of mentions on Twitter. People seem to like it a lot.

Try it out!

It started from the mild inconvenience of searching for BioBricks in the lab. We had no idea it would eventually be used on 5 continents.

Check it out! It's cool!

We meet a few times to go over what we will say to the Summer of Startups panel, so that they will accept us to the program.

This culminates on the 28th, when we have the interview. Our team leader tries to attend through Skype, but the panel doesn't like it. We manage to pull through anyway and the panel is very excited about us at the end.

We get in.

We presented ourselves and our initial ideas to a panel of experts, mostly researchers from VTT and some from the Viikki biocampus.

They received us very well and there was a lot of interesting discussion. We also noticed that we can pretty cool things as a group.

We presented our initial ideas to our advisor, Markus, in preparation for the expert meet. We discussed what direction to go and what kind of idea to pick.

We made an introduction video of us so we could apply to Summer of Startups. We got pretty good stuff!

The first version of our website was built. We wanted it to look cool. It didn't.

Some brainstorming. Wild ideas. Rating the ideas. Post-it gradient.

The first team meeting was held on a Friday afternoon. Some of us met each other for the first time ever, some had met before already. We talked about the project and got to know each other.

Oskari kirjoittaa.