Team:Westminster UK/HP/Silver

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Public Engagement

Science 4U 14^th April

The annual University of Westminster iGEM science4U took place this year with 230 students (year 5 and 6) from 14 primary schools invited to partake in a day of presentations! We had puzzles and games prepared while we engaged with students about the realities and possibilities of synthetic biology. We found that the students were actually very open minded about the topic whereas the teachers bought more into stereotypes such as genetically modified virus bombs!

New Scientist convention Thursday 28 September 2017

Having heard of the New Scientist expo coming to ExCel centre this fall, the team decided that it would be a fantastic opportunity to join and share our project as well as talk about antibiotic resistance to the engaged public! The team were very excited to visit the exhibition and talk about our projects, we also ran into Warwick iGEM and exchanged project ideas (and stress!)

Biology week

On the week of the 16^th October, our team decided to join a group of academics to talk about biology as well as our project to university students. We also decided to use this as an opportunity to talk about iGEM in order to entice more students to join!

Antibiotics unearthed talk on 25^th October 2017

Antibiotics unearthed is a public engagement project as well as a tool set out by the Microbiology society in order to develop new antibiotics. We were invited by Dr Linda Percy in order to give a brief talk about our project to a cohort of students. We also talked about what iGEM was and promoted the competition as a fantastic opportunity for students to engage in.

Engagement

During our project, we also decided also grow our media presence and thus invested time to try increase our social media presence. The official Bio-busters twitter and Instagram pages in particular were constantly updated.

Our social media activity also caught the attention of academics early on and thus allowed us to build up our team’s reservoir of contacts! We also got into contact with the university press and became published on the main page!

Our social media activity also caught the attention of academics early on and thus allowed us to build up our team’s reservoir of contacts! We also got into contact with the university press and became published on the main page!

Public Surveys

In order for us to assess the public perception of Synthetic Biology, we decided to hand out surveys on regents street and oxford street and collected the data. The results were somewhat surprising.