What education is to us
Raising awareness about the crisis we are fighting to the public has always been a priority for us. We believe that educating the population is very important for the multidisciplinary development of a project of this kind.
To appeal to a wide variety of the public, we reached out to people from many different backgrounds. We wanted to raise awareness about this environmental issue that’s so present in our home, and wanted to better understand the implication it has on all these people, as well as on a national level.
We also wanted to teach the Catalan population what synthetic biology is, and what iGEM stands for, both its goals and values.
Using AlgaGenix as a model, we set out to inform people about the importance and potential of Synthetic Biology.
Action plan: "The education pyramid”
Since the beginning of the project, we wanted to develop a unique and integrated educational plan where we could include all our educational activities.
That is why we designed the “Educational Pyramid”.
This illustration represents the different target groups we set out to reach, which have accomplished by identifying their characteristics, interests and needs, so we could implement an engaging, pedagogical campaign for them.
1. THE ENTIRE POPULATION
Target group characteristics
This group includes all members of society. It is a very heterogeneous collective that doesn’t have any direct relation with synthetic biology or general biology. Hence, their knowledge of the topic is reduced and the activities designed have to explore general concepts.
As it is an extremely diverse group, we developed diverse strategies so many of them could have access to the information through different platforms and systems. Our motto was “There are many curious people in the world, we just had to find the best way to engage with them and help them learn with us”.
Activities developed
Face-to-face education in the streets
one of our team members spent several afternoons in the most crowded streets of Barcelona trying to interact with pedestrians. With the aid of visual support, he taught what synthetic biology was to a large number of people and explained our project to them.
Magazine
alongside our Human Practices and Communication sections, we developed a divulgative and professional magazine. It included information about the problem we planned on solving, our project and many other scientific facts and articles written by our team members and external collaborators.
Radio interview
one of our team members visited a local radio (“Ràdio Sió d’Agramunt”) to talk about synthetic biology and our project. This was a very important part of our education platform, as we had the chance to make less knowledgeable people learn what synthetic biology is, and how we can use it for good. The people targeted here are from small rural villages very involved with agriculture, and severely affected by nitrates.
Social media posts
in collaboration with our Communication department, we have published several divulgative posts on Instagram and videos on TikTok. We also engaged with our audience through quizzes and open-answer questions.
Contribution
People could have access to our educational activities through the radio, social media, the internet, paper, and just by talking. We knew that by expanding our platform we could reach more people.
That led to a higher impact on our educational proposals and to a more personalized pedagogical strategy.
In numbers:
2. YOUNG STUDENTS
Target group characteristics
This group includes students going through compulsory education: from ages 6 to 16.
It is still a really diverse group, but they all have one thing in common: all of them are in the best learning age. This makes them a great audience, as they need to acquire general knowledge that may determine their career path.
Nevertheless, new generations are technology-dependent, and classical learning methods are not best suited for most of them.
Therefore, we created more engaging content that they will pay attention to and enjoy. We find it to be a very refreshing educational tactic that would have appealed to us too, had we been in their situation.
Activities
Educational music album
we wrote, performed, and produced an entire music album that consists mostly of covers of popular songs. We rewrote them so they addressed topics such as history of biology, synthetic biology, metabolism, iGEM and AlgaGenix. However, there is one original song we have been wanting to release for a really long time for the iGEM community: The iGEM anthem.
Contribution
With the songs, we aim to help students learn science in a fun, refreshing way. The songs are intended to be catchy, so that they may be useful when trying to learn specific concepts at school. Each song has a different level of complexity and is targeted to a different range of ages depending on the topics we explained. In fact, we have developed this music album so other members of the community may benefit from our songs.
3. UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Target group characteristics
Young adults who haven’t started studying their University experience yet. These people know the basics of science, but it is only a general perception.
All those who may be interested in pursuing a career in science (more specifically biology), often find themselves struggling to decide which major to pursue.
We figured that in this key decisive moment, they would need guidance and advice. It is extremely helpful to learn about other people’s experiences and how professional life in the field is like.
Activities
High school talks
We prepared interactive presentations and talks in high schools in Catalonia, aimed at last-year high school students. For them, we presented our project and explained what Synthetic Biology is, in an attempt to make them understand what biology is set out to do in the future.
Mentoring
Following the high school sessions, we got to personally mentor students who needed help or had career doubts. By explaining our personal experience, we hope to have aided them in choosing their bachelor's degree.
Contribution
Students normally enjoy talking with people close to their age and they appreciate this kind of activity. Therefore, the talks were very well received by both students and teachers who work in the high schools.
For most of them, it was the first time they were learning about Synthetic Biology and they relished discovering this new field.
4. SCIENTISTS
Target group characteristics
This group includes students who are currently enrolled in a biology-related degree and want to get into research and graduate students who are still in formation of some kind (Masters Students…).
They have wider and more specific scientific knowledge, and it is possible to engage with them in conversations involving several Synthetic Biology techniques and discoveries.
Hence, the education activities designed had to be formal and achieve a high level of complexity.
Activities
Talk at CRAG
Due to the visit of some Korean students who wanted to learn more about the research performed at CRAG, we got to explain our project to them. We provided details on the experimental part and we also got to teach them about certain techniques. We also explained to them what iGEM is.
Fellow talks Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera
We got to explain our project and educate about it (both the design and the problem we were trying to solve). We did a talk to different young scientists that besides University, are also engaged in other scientific activities or even perform their own research.
Contribution
We got to do divulgation of the project while educating about certain aspects of it. For this talk, we focused more on the problems and the experimental tools he used to develop our project.
The target group got to learn about our job and about how can Synthetic Biology look in action. They also helped us, since the exchange of ideas and their doubts were extremely helpful for improving our project in the long term.
5. EXPERTS
Target group characteristics
This group includes active researchers on the topic our project is about and in other science fields. It is the narrowest group we tried to engage with. Nevertheless, it is also composed of many international people, with cultural differences but a common passion for scientific development and biology.
The educational activities we did were part of formal scientific meetings and organized Symposiums and Congresses.
Activities
ATG SynBio Congress
We presented our research at the Congress arranged by ATG. We also helped with the organization of the event, letting high-level scientific education happen in Barcelona.
Trieste Next International Academy
We elaborated a poster and presented our research at an international science congress. Both professionals and undergraduate students learned from our project presentation.
Contribution
We got to do divulgation of the project while educating about certain aspects of it. For this talk, we focused more on the problems and the experimental tools he used to develop our project.
The target group got to learn about our job and about how can Synthetic Biology look in action. They also helped us, since the exchange of ideas and their doubts were extremely helpful for improving our project in the long term.
Description of our activities
This section includes a detailed description of all the educational projects we have mentioned thus far:
Face-to-face interactions
Our commitment to the community is essential for developing the main goal of the project. In order to accomplish this, we did some street interviews where we could teach and learn about people’s points of view on different topics related to our proposal.
The main idea consisted of walking around Barcelona's city center for a week and focusing on different ranges of ages without distinctions. Our role was to explain to some people what we were aiming to do for society with our project as a way of educating and clarifying some terms that can cause confusion.
We also included some basic topics such as:
Genetically modified organisms
We presented our research at the Congress arranged by ATG. We also helped with the organization of the event, letting high-level scientific education happen in Barcelona.
Scientific social-media content
We elaborated a poster and presented our research at an international science congress. Both professionals and undergraduate students learned from our project presentation.
The principal method we chose was designing a catchy and short presentation to which people could pay attention whilst speaking to them.
We explained the current nitrate crisis, what it implies, our high-value compounds and their benefits; and finally, the steps we followed, and we are following, to achieve our goals. The response that we got and could feel was pretty nice. Moreover, many others actually felt grateful for giving them this information that the vast majority of them considered very important.
Joining our educational activities, a survey was spread in order to understand our audience and its knowledge about some topics. In this way, we also thought it could be useful for generating more content and creating an impact on them. This was the easiest and best way of connecting with people and listening to their needs and wants.
It was spread around our social media. We asked if they could resend it to their close friends and family. This provided us with appropriate information. We also sought not to exclude any collective.
We asked the following questions and we got these results (from more than 100 answers):
Our conclusions were well-supported and clear: people are demanding more information and support for scientific projects. That can enable them to make better decisions about public policies that might improve their general lifestyles.
In the same direction, society is changing, and knowledge is arriving in places where it was unexpected and almost impossible before. For this reason, AlgaGenix opts to keep fighting for better life conditions in terms of water quality and eco-alternatives.
Magazine
Our educational campaigns promote a circular path of learning where we try to connect most of the terminology we are using to make it more comprehensible and easy to catch. Thus, we designed a magazine full of scientific content and articles related to the mission we are to accomplish and the points we also need the population to know.
Also, it serves as a mark in our history for a better future reference so others can recreate or even obtain information that can be used to improve methodologies or implement new inspirational hypotheses.
To better explain our idea, the magazine contains a series of articles and different pages full of information related to our studies with microalgae as well as different explanations related to the iGEM competition and others.
Having said this, our intentions are directed to a varied group of people such as the general population, and amateur scientists, and we could even include experts and scientists.
Radio Interview
Assisting this radio interview was a very important moment for us, as on rare occasions we get to tailor our content so specifically to the recipients. However, when preparing the interview we had to really remember how the public we were reaching was very diverse, and we needed to appeal to people without any scientific background. The interview was broadcasted on two different days, at two different times and two different radios: Ràdio Sió and Aquí a l’oest. This allowed us to ensure our message would reach as many people as it could.
In this instance, we focused particularly on educating why and how nitrates affect our home region, and to better make the population aware of how this affects them and how they can help revert it. Additionally, it helped to teach younger listeners about what life in STEM can be like, as we also talked about degrees and biology in the professional work field.
We simplified the contents of our project significantly to have a wider outreach to the population and offered them access to our social media so they could become more acquainted with the problem we are facing and how we intend to solve it.
Text translation: Topic of the day: scientific research “Our intention is to develop a project that uses synthetic biology to solve a local problem, as are nitrate contaminated waters…” Ares Font, 2nd year biotechnology student.
Social media posts
We developed two main divulgation strategies on our social media.
Discover AlgaGenix
We wanted to reach a broad audience, so we planned a series of educational posts that could provide the basic information needed to understand our project.
We worked with microalgae to make them improve their ability to absorb nitrates from polluted waters and transform those nitrates into cytokinins.
Therefore, our posts treated the following topics:
Water
Uses of water, where can we find water, the importance of water, drinking water composition, water pollutants.
Nitrate Contamination
What are nitrates, where do they come from, how nitrates affect us, nitrate contamination in Catalonia.
Water Treatment
Wastewater treatment plants, types of wastewater treatment plants, the different levels of water processing, wastewater treatment steps, how wastewater treatment plants look like.
Microalgae
What are microalgae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, why Chlamydomonas is a good model organism.
Cytokinins
What are cytokinins, the importance of cytokinins, how cytokinins are synthesized.
All the information was presented in a simple and appealing way. We also created our own format for the posts and we followed the AlgaGenix aesthetic and color palette for all of them.
Chapter 1: What do you know about water? Of our Discover AlgaGenix posts series.
Besides divulging, we tried to interact with our audience. To do so, we posted several short questions on our stories on the day before publishing the corresponding post on our feed. Our goal was to engage with our audience in a way they would be expecting the post the next day: both to learn new things and to check if they got the questions right.
In addition, it has to be highlighted how our posts created the final image of a bioreactor when combined together in our Instagram feed. As the final application of our project is the design of a bioreactor, we wanted to capture that in this series of posts. It is an analogy of how all the basic information we were providing could help them also to create an idea of our project.
TikTok posts
We also tried to educate our audience through short TikTok videos. The objective was to present information in an entertaining way so we could reach a young audience (the predominant TikTok users).
We also posted the videos on Instagram, a platform in which we received greater feedback.
AlgaGenix Music Album
In order to educate young students in an entertaining way, we were determined to develop an original and innovative strategy. We wanted it to help them learn both simple and complex biological concepts while having fun. That’s how we got with the Music Album idea.
We have always enjoyed educative music. When our teachers at high school would teach us specific content while providing an alternative musicalized additional explanation, we found it easier to memorize and remember the notions. In addition, students are diverse, hence teachers need to provide diverse learning strategies. For the ones that appreciate this musical support, this alternative is extremely helpful for their learning process.
Therefore, we wanted to create new biology songs that could be used in classes during the following years to facilitate the teaching task. We would also become what we admired when we were kids.
Tracks
The last song is an original tune about the iGEM competition. We want to dedicate this song to all teams that have ever participated in this magnificent event. The song will be released with a customized music video after the Jamboree, since it will be recorded there.
High School Talks
Our high school visits and talks consisted of short presentations centred around synthetic biology as the conductor thread. We wanted to make it an interactive, easy-to-follow experience, so we designed the presentations with practical examples of synthetic biology. This way, we had a conducting thread that linked together all the examples, and each of them could develop a topic with more detail.
Mentoring
Mentoring consisted of brief interactions with students, generally after the short educational presentations. As we are aware of the uncertainty that comes with electing what major to choose for University, we realised that insight from current students that are attending the major could be very valuable for them. We dedicated around 15 minute after the presentations so the students could have this opportunity to hear about real university experiences, which they were really grateful for, as many of them can find it hard to differentiate between the different biology-related majors.
Fellow Talks Catalunya La Pedrera
Among dialogues and presentations, Fellow Talks La Pedrera gave us room to show the idea we considered as a solution to the problem we found. Many students and young researchers who attended the symposium, expressed their doubts and hypotheses about information we could consult to speed our project up and execute it sooner than we expected.
This marked the introduction of our project to the scientific society as we exposed all the processes we were developing as well as the constant work it implies.
Apart from this, we took part in one of the interventions where we participated in a debate related to environmental management and we gave our point of view on many of the problematics we can watch and be particularly affected.
ATG SynBio Congress
Many of our investigations are mainly made from zero. For this reason, attending the ATG Synbio Congress helped us to divulge more knowledge about microalgae applications and ways we thought these ideas could be developed.
Apart from this interest, our group taught about the new focus we try to have in our group as we planned on sowing and reaping new alternatives for solving the same issue.
However, this activity also allowed us to make new contacts and learn the perspective of different professionals involved both in the industry and in society (although our focus was more directed to farmers and little countrymen).
Trieste Next International Academy
The Trieste Next Festival of Scientific Research is an event that occurs in September each year in Trieste, Italy. Particularly, we attended the International Academy, where students from all over Europe joined different talks and round tables.
As the Barcelona-UB iGEM team we had the opportunity not only to attend but to present our project in a panel with a poster presentation. We could present our project to a community of international students and professionals and get their feedback.
Therefore, we confectioned a poster just for the occasion that included a description of the problem we were trying to solve, an extensive insight into our methodology, and future perspectives (among other information).
We taught our audience about the enormous issue of nitrate pollution in Catalonia and the tools we have designed to mitigate this. We solved numerous doubts people in the audience had about some specific details of our presentation and we got to show our promotional video for the first time.
It was a truly enriching experience in which we could provide some knowledge to our public but we also learned significantly.
