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Events/Scotland meetup
From 2008.igem.org
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
[http://www.leagueagainsttedium.co.uk 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 [http://www.see.ed.ac.uk Dr Andrew Firth] for his help in running this activity. On the 16th July we had a day of actual work.
