Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/hp explosion

iGEM Mascot

With the purpose of obtaining information of how our high school and the public in general sees iGEM and our iGEM CIDEB project we created our own iGEM mascot. According to the divulgation objective, the group has developed activities with the goal of showing an overview of synthetic biology, as an initiative and entertaining visual recognition, a mascot was elaborated. The importance and objective of the mascot is to generate interest among people, causing them to come and see paraphernalia explaining our project (posters, bracelets bearing an explanation of our project, etc.) There are two main activities where the motley was used; the first one is called DNA Week – it took place inside a high school, and consisted of several activities that promoted synthetic biology. The second activity was called Race 4 Science, and consisted in a series of modules concerning synthetic biology and its different areas.

iGEM Explosion

When we started our project, we noticed that the students, teachers and administrative employees in our high school, were not involved in our project and in the iGEM competition as we wanted them to be. For this reason, we decided to make the iGEM “Explosion” to inform everyone in our high school about iGEM and stimulate their curiosity.

Our activities were all focused in giving them a little bit of information about us in a creative way.

For this “Explosion”, we designed several posters with images related to iGEM and some more with information about our project. After this, on the first day after vacations, we placed these posters all over our high school building in commonly visited areas. With this we could make the students to pass and look what the posters said, inciting curiosity towards iGEM.

We also made a Facebook page and Twitter account with the purpose of uploading pictures of the team working, several science related images, information related to our project and updates of our activities in laboratory, so people could see all of our progress in an easy way.

We wanted everyone to have something personal and related to us, so we made bracelets and sold them. Both of the designs we made had the caption “IGEM” on them, the blue bracelets also had some little figures representing the 4 modules or our project and a tiny E.CARU with its representative snorkel. The other design was either given in green and white (iGEM colors) or purple and yellow (our High School colors), they looked like the DNA structure and were hand-made by us!

Results:

The posters gained the attention of the people who were walking nearby. Teachers and students stopped and after reading them they continued their way. Now people had the opportunity of learning what our project is about just by walking through the high school halls.

Impact:

With the purpose of motivating second semester students, we planned and exposed an informative conference for the people who were interested in being part of next year’s iGEM CIDEB team. We introduced them the idea that our project should continue in our high school. With activities like “Explosion”, we caught their attention because they could find out what an iGEM project is, what it consists of, and how exciting it can be. The conference was in our high school auditorium. When the set hour arrived, students were already inside; they showed real interest of being part of this, because they discovered what iGEM is about.