Events/Scotland meetup

iGEM-UK Shindig, 15/16th July 2008
(Hosted at the University of Edinburgh)

All the UK iGEM teams were invited to a wee get-together in Edinburgh to share experiences, trials, tribulations, best-practise and a few beers! Or a few more than a few... whose idea was the vodka bar?

Matthieu - Bubble-gum flavour vodka is just wrong on so many levels, seriously.

Anyway here's a picture of the teams before they went on a brain cell killing spree.

THE SERIOUS BUSINESS 15th July
Simon Munnery, comedian, "The engineering equivalent of Genetic Engineering is to get a bunch of concrete and steel, throw it into a river, and if you can walk across it, call it a bridge."

With this in mind we kicked off with an ice-breaker team-builder where we mixed up folks from the 5 different institutions (Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Imperial and Newcastle) into 6 teams to compete against each other to build bridges made from popsicle sticks. The strongest bridge won a drinkable prize - my idea so I guess I should take some of the blame from the descent experienced that evening... It was all a bit of fun but it did have a underlying motivation: The teams should have learned the importance of doing proper design / brainstorming prior to building and that having a good skills mix within the team was important. NOT sure it ran exactly along those lines...

There were a clutch of teams which held over 3kg of weight but the winning team was "iGEM Log".Thanks to Dr Andrew Firth for his help in running this activity. On the 16th July we had a day of actual work.