Workshops with citizens

On July 11th, we hosted a workshop at the NightScience event organized by the CRI (Center of Interdisciplinary Researches). 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 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 realized a little cookbook so they could try the recipes at home. In an attempt to see if they acquired some knowledge with the presentations, we decided to give them twice the same questionnaire, before and after the presentation, but due to the little 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 show the evolution of the answers on one question regarding the microbiome. 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.

#IndianApero at Cité Universitaire

With the help of a former iGEMer from the Paris Bettencourt 2014 and the CIUP Paris Descartes, we could organize a little party at Cité Internationale Universitaire in Paris. Cité Universitaire is a foundation that host students from all over the world in Houses. We organized this event at the College Franco-Britannique to advertize our project and to see how students view our project and gather their ideas and comments. We prepared for them Indian snacks such as Idli and Dosa and we made an exposition with 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.