Team:Groningen/Engagement

Public Engagement

Here is described all the people we talked to!

European Meetup iGEM Delft - 6 July

The European iGEM meet up for the Netherlands was held in Delft this year. The meet up started with a talk by Cees Dekker, a well known physicist. It was quite interesting to hear about the common ground between physics and biology in his talk. After the break we had the talk from Denis Murphy, he is highly involved in palm oil. Palm oil is used a lot for cosmetics in richer countries, and for sustenance in poorer countries. He expanded on a specific application for genetic engineering for making sustainable palm oil plantations. The main event of the day was of course the poster presentations of all the iGEM teams themselves. We walked around a lot, talking to pretty much every team at least once. It was very nice to see all the Dutch teams again here after we had met them during the Dutch iGEM meet up in Wageningen. During all this we handed out our 3D printed phages to the teams too. The last part of the day was a BBQ with some drinks. We left together with some of the other teams and talked more about how our respective projects were going.

Ferdinand Van Der Graaf - 30 August

We met with Ferdinand van der Graaf to discus the game we are designing about synthetic biology safety. He works as a researcher at the UMCG hospital, as well as a teacher at a local highscool. In his teachings he uses a lot of educational games, and had previously designed a game to teach about natural selection. We talked about how to implement game elements in a balanced way while not giving up too much learning elements. Furthermore he recommended to stick to tried and true game elements that work, something we found to be true too.