Human practices

School visit

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.