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Communicating science to someone who is already interested is quite an easy task. But to establish a dialog between the uninterested public and the team, a catalyst is sometimes needed. To help future teams light this spark we have written a guide for how to catalyze this interaction resulting in a higher yield of mutual communication.
Step 1: It is important that it is easy to take in the knowledge. Making science understandable for the general public is the first of the key factors.
Step 2: An uninterested public has to associate science with something they already like or a fun activity.
Step 3: Encourage them to do something creative with their new knowledge, for example letting them use science as a tool to do something that's close to them or relatable.
With those steps in mind we planned and carried out an activity with the aim of creating a dialogue between us and groups of the public without any prior active interest in science or synthetic biology.
What did we do?
To test these three steps we decided on an educational session with high school students. We sent out emails to teachers and asked them if we could come and visit. Two schools were chosen on the basis of their compatibility with our schedule. The educational session was divided into two parts: one informative and one experimental. In the presentation, we made references to popular culture to make it easier to understand (Step 1). We wanted them to associate science to something that they think is fun and relaxed (Step 2). To complete the session we showed an easy experiment they would be able to perform at home with regular things the kitchen. The experiment was to extract DNA from different fruits. For this we divided the students into smaller groups allowing for more communication and smalltalk.
What did we accomplish?
The best thing was that both the iGEM team had a fun day but it also seemed like the students and teachers also had a lot of fun! They were asking questions and participating in the discussion and listening to what we had to say. When we did the experiment we got many questions about how they could take this further. Dialogue with the students was not only about synthetic biology but also science in general and we got the impression that some of the students got a newly awakened interest in science!
What did we learn?
The main thing we took with us was a great approach for making people interested and understand what science is about. It would have been rewarding to try this in a different setting with a bigger target group of different ages to see what would happen for instance, meeting people that are not in an educational environment and see if we can get a similar response.
Our greatest success was the experiment. Many had done DNA extraction in biology class before but it surprised them that they could do it with things they could find in their own kitchen.
One thing that could be improve on was step 1. We did not manage to break the information down to a simple enough level and we overestimated their knowledge. We could have worked better with the references and gone further into the basics to make it easier to follow.
