Team:ETH Zurich/human/outreach

From 2014.igem.org

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==School visits==
==School visits==
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One side of our human practice is to share knowledge with the public. For this reason one day mid-October Stefanie and Nadine had the chance to teach students at the age of 16-17years at a high school in Bern, Switzerland. Through these lectures, we attempted to impart the basic principles of synthetic biology and encouraged the students to participate in a discussion of the concepts presented. In these discussions we tried to focus on risks to humans, health, the environment and the public. Furthermore former iGEM projects were quickly outlined and their possibilities and potential discussed.  
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One side of our human practice is to share knowledge with the public. For this reason one day mid-October Stefanie and Nadine had the chance to teach students at the age of 16-17 years at a high school in Bern, Switzerland. Through these lectures, we attempted to impart the basic principles of synthetic biology and encouraged the students to participate in a discussion of the concepts presented. In these discussions we tried to focus on risks to humans, health, the environment and the public. Furthermore former iGEM projects were quickly outlined and their possibilities and potential discussed.  
Thus, we increase the level of awareness of synthetic biology and simultaneously teach them how to approach complex problems.
Thus, we increase the level of awareness of synthetic biology and simultaneously teach them how to approach complex problems.
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==Simplify: Explore synthetic biology at your own pace ==
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All the past teams did an incredibly good job to bring Synthetic Biology to the public, involving more and more curious people to have their first contact with the subject. While reaching for the general public and talking to people outside the academia, we became aware of a fundamental disconnect. Several of the people we met were captivated by the idea of synthetic biology, and after talking with us about our project, they decided to independently explore past iGEM works and ideas.
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The main issue we registered was, that they could understand the introduction pages and grasp the general idea of projects, but often found challenging to move from the descriptive level to an understanding of the underlying mechanism without some external help. We think that at this stage as a community we are missing instruments that help interested people to easily and independently explore and extend their knowledge with the help of iGEM wikis.
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The Simplify button is our idea to create a constant and direct link between the popular science and the technical version of our work. Visitors from the general public can understand each piece of information in its descriptive version and then check how that specific element works more in detail. This should mitigate the division between an inspiring introduction and a sudden high wall of complex biology or mathematical modeling.
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We are deeply interested in starting a discussion with people with deeper expertise in scientific writing and popularization in order to improve this approach and diffuse it among other teams making it easier for curious minds to explore the wide and inspiring collection of iGEM projects
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==Simplifying our wiki for the public==
 
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Simplify buttons...
 

Latest revision as of 03:28, 18 October 2014

iGEM ETH Zurich 2014