Outreach

In this part of our Human Practice we talked to every kind of people about Synthetic Biology, iGEM, food-transmitted diseases (as cholerae is one of them) and our project using several fun ways to do it. In addition we inquire, for the first time, why our team (Universidad de los Andes) has been the only Colombian team during four years, while other latin american countries have several iGEM teams. Do other Colombian universities know about iGEM? Do they research in synthetic biology? Take a look of this section!

Why we are the only iGEM Team in Colombia??

TEXTO 1

Bake sale: Outreach and delicious desserts

The best combination at all!

Probably this part does not need too much explanation, as @iGEM said "Delicious way to fundraise and perform outreach!"

Listening our partners

In addition to the important experts' opinion, we wanted to listen our partners as well. The Student Council of the Department of Biological Science at Universidad de los Andes organizes the called "Seminarios de lo Oculto" which are conferences developed by students about different topics related to science. We took advatage of this space to talk to undergraduate students of Biology, Microbiology and related programs about Sherlock coli and his important mission.

In the same way of all described before, we carried out a great feedback from this exprience. We listened to the questions that our partners did and we took into account their comments to improve our project with their opinions, which are not other thing than opinions of future professionals.

In addition, our conference was also an opportunity to give out our ideas in our Faculty and promote debate around them.

Here, some pictures of our speakers :)

Teaching to the little ones!

Maloka is a well known colombian intitution that looks for Science's outreach. It has its main facility in Bogotá, where offers to all citizens (adults and children) interactive experiments, 360°-movies, science exhibitions and all kind of outreach.

This year Maloka organized an event called Carnaval de la Ciencia (Science's Carnival), where different groups, such as companies and universities shared their environmental-friendly projects of science to the community, specially to children. Off course iGEM Colombia Team was there!!

The event had a duration of two days, in the second day we recieved a letter that makes us feel so proud of our work. The letter has senteces as "this experience helped to break paradigms" or "your participation is an important factor to build (...) educative strategies to change the scientific history of our country" :)

But, wanting more from this expierience, we also asked to people for complete the sentence # I want a bacterium that..., and we got answers as:

Take cellfies; Makes me thiner; eliminates the corruption; loves me; makes me stand awake; gives me money; makes the homeworks; makes me fall in love...

Social Networks

To be in contact with all interested people we have profiles in the most known social networks. We got 382 followers on Facebook and 118 followers on Twitter. We used these sites to upload information about our projects, to inform about what we've done, what we're doing and of course to invite people to our activites, as the bacterial survey. People frequently motivate us by these media and even people who are interested in be part of the team write us on Facebook asking how they can be a member of iGEM Colombia Team :)