Team:Paris Bettencourt/Practices/Events

July

iGEM Bootcamp @ University College London

We participated in the iGEM Bootcamp organized by the University College of London, and we took the opportunity to use the biohackspace in London to start the assembly of the DIY Lambda spectrophotometer.

Workshops during NightScience

On July 11th, we hosted a workshop at the NightScience event organized by the CRI (Center of Interdisciplinary Researche). This workshop was made to present our project along with the different disciplines and topics that gravitate around it (synthetic biology, microorganisms, fermentation and nutrition) and to collect people's point of view about them. With the presentations, we made a cooking workshop to introduce people to Indian fermented food (Idli and Dosa) and we prepared a little cookbook so they could try the recipes at home. We made at the same time a small workshop with volunteers to build our DIY spectrophotometer.

In an attempt to see if the participants learned from the presentations, we gave them a questionnaire, before and after the presentation, but due to the small number of participants, we couldn't get any significant results. Nevertheless, we could understand how non-scientific people see our project when they answered the open questions. The following graph shows the evolution of the answers on one question regarding the microbiome before and after the presentations. We can see that the number of people getting the right answer after the talk increased.



Here is a photo of the workshop, when people shared their thoughts on the project while eating idli, dosa and snacks.


September

Lunch with the M1 AIV at the CRI

We organized a little lunch at the CRI (Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity) in Paris to present our project and to get comments from the fresh new students of the promotion that came from all over the world.

Brunch in the Indian Dorm at Cité Universitaire:

At the CIUP, there is an Indian House which accomodates Indian Students studying in France. We contacted them and organized a little brunch with the Cooking Club. They shared some recipes with us, and we presented our project (in an informal way) to get their feedback. It was also the time for us to advertize our Indian Apero for the following week. It was a really enjoyable brunch and we had a lot of fun; the students were really interested in our project and found it innovative. For them, including culture and repsect of tradition is something important and the DIY concept of the Ferment it Yourself project was also really liked.


#IndianApero at Cité Universitaire:

With the help of a former iGEMer from the Paris Bettencourt 2014 team and the CIUP Paris Descartes, we could organize a little party at Cité Internationale Universitaire in Paris. Cité Universitaire is a foundation that hosts students from all over the world on its campus in the south of Paris. We organized this event at the College Franco-Britannique House on the Cité U. campus to advertize our project and to see how students view our project and gather their ideas and comments. We prepared Indian snacks for them such as Idli and Dosa and we made an exposition with a poster so they could walk and read what they were interested in.

The explanations were formal but still, it was a really nice experience because we shared many thoughts with the participants and they were really into our project. There was students from many houses and especially from House of India. These students talked about their country and the political, social and economical issues. There was every possible study background, from law to mathematics, and from computer science to biology. Once they understood our project, we shared a little survey to know which person, if they had the occasion, would try our product. Surprisingly, among the 33 person that came, only one person said she wouldn't try it. Our project seemed to be well accepted among foreign students.


Workshop at Sèvres with the CIRP

The CRI organized a weeklong workshops session with the help of the CIRP (Center of Innovation and Research in Pedagogy in Paris) and we had the chance to conduct a little workshop for the students that participated to the event. We made a short presentation of our prject and the different themes that rotate around it (fermentation, microbiome, etc). It was again an occasion to collect comment and feedback about our project.