"
Team:TU Eindhoven/Society/Outreach/Informal Information Evening
From 2014.igem.org
Informal Information Evening
On Friday the 26th of September we hosted an open evening for friends, family and other interested parties to inform them of the essence of synthetic biology, its opportunities and challenges and our iGEM project. During the evening we gave two presentations, one on synthetic biology in general (Dutch or English) and one on our project specifically (Dutch or English). To see whether or not we helped our guests better understand synthetic biology we also performed a small test. Results and the test itself are discussed below. Further more some pictures are shown below in order to give an impression of the evening.
Cremers and a quick test for the audience was led by Bram Somers
and Minke Nijenhuis.
test, while enjoying a a cup of coffee or tea.
mechanisms was given by Anke Boschman. The microfluidics part was
covered by Leroy Tan and Bram Somers explained some application
scenarios of our Click Coli system.
(ICMS) for providing us with a location for this great evening.
In our opinion the evening was quite successful and we are glad we could share our enthusiasm for synthetic biology with the community. We hope we have presented synthetic biology and our iGEM project in a way that was understandable to everyone present the evening of the 26th of September. If there are questions about the content of the lectures, please contact the presenters of the lectures.
Tests on relevant knowledge and associations
As said before, during the informal information evening, participants were given various small tests to test their basic knowledge. They took those tests before and after the presentations. The goal of this small experiment was to gauge the effect of this information evening on the basic knowledge of synthetic biology on the participants. The basic knowledge test that we made and used is available in Dutch and English.
The results are as follows: at the start of the evening, the contestants scored an average of 5.51/10. At the end of the evening, after the presentation, the contestants scored an average of 6.75/10. Thus, in the sense of educating its participant, the informal information evening was a success.
A second small experiment was performed. We want evaluate the participants’ associations with the words ‘bacterium’ and ‘Genetically Modified Organism (GMO)’. An association test was performed at the beginning of the evening and at the end. During this test, participants were given 1 minute to write down the first three things they thought about after hearing the word. Below, word clouds that were made using these tests as input can be seen. Words more frequently used are displayed bigger compared to words that were not mentioned as frequent.
at the beginning of the evening.
at the end of the evening.
