Education and Public Engagement

Introduction of iGEM at the School Festival

12 Nov.2016
Our team leader Saki participated in Super Presentation Contest, which was held in the school festival of Kobe University, “Rokko-sai”.

She talked about what synthetic biology is and also talked about her enthusiasm for iGEM 2017. We believed that we could make the audience interested in synthetic biology and iGEM, which was still unfamiliar to most of our university students.

Our presentation was posted to YouTube and published all over the world.

Hyper Interdisciplinary Conference

11,12 Mar. 2017
The purpose of this conference is to friendly discuss each project beyond the boundaries of different academic fields. We gave poster presentations over 2 days.

We introduced the potential of synthetic biology to those who are not familiar with this field through familiar theme, Japanese green tea. Many of them were surprised that such a small organism could obtain various unique functions.

Through this poster session, we were also influenced by various unique ideas. For example, through a discussion of representatives of beverage manufacturers, we learned the importance of connecting with people and listening to their voices. This experience directed us to listen to many voices in tea industry and to visit several tea farms. Besides, we were also advised by audience and judges how to give an effective presentation so that audience would understand it more easily.

Introduction of iGEM in May Festival

20, 21 May 2017
Together with other Japanese iGEM teams at May Festival held in Tokyo University, we gave poster presentations to the public.

We made an effort to let the audience know the usefulness of synthetic biology through demonstrating our projects. We destributed the booklets on iGEM and iGEM Kobe there.

Building iGEM Kobe website in Japanese

A surprose to us,iGEM was still unfamiliar to most of university students in Japan. One of the biggest reason is that Japanese rarely visit web sites written in English because of the language barrier. To make iGEM more understandable and accessible to Japanese people, we created our website in Japanese. From there, the visitors to our website could know about our iGEM project. They could also find links to our twitter account where our recent activities and members introduction were updated (very friendly).

Our Japanese website

Tweets by @iGEM_Kobe

Distribution of booklets about Japanese tea

We created our booklets on Japanese tea under the supervision of Mr.Matsumoto (owner of tea farm) and his wife.

We summarized the beneficial health effects of theanine, the effective way of pouring green tea, the processing method of tea, and so on.