Hi everyone,
It was great to be at the conference and have so many wonderful conversation. It is going to be a pretty big job for Jimena to edit all the video material for this one, but I already look forward to the result!
Meanwhile, I would like to draw your attention to a teaching opportunity. In Januari 2018 we start the next edition of the BioHack Academy and would like to welcome new instructors to the course. The BHA is an education program that takes place at several “partner labs” in the world in parallel. The labs are connected via a video stream, during a weekly lecture session. So far we have been streaming from our lab in Amsterdam. In edition 5 I look forward to welcome new instructors to the course that would also like to share their open project with the BHA participants.
The instructions are supposed to be about real, documented projects that are replicable in any lab in the world.
From previous experience I can tell that it’s incredibly rewarding to see that others have successfully replicated designs or even improved it. Apart from that great feeling we are also offering a fee for each talk.
In case you are interested, please check out the call on our website: http://waag.org/nl/vacature/call-instructors-biohack-academy
All the best,
Pieter
Cool, @pieter . I have only briefly read the publications on the BHA website, but I couldn’t find any guidelines for partnerlabs on finding participants if they organize their own academy. Say, best practices in pushing this out on social media, flyers, local word of mouth, … Practical things.
Wondering if this is interesting to learn from, and perhaps leads to more labs taking the step to participate.
Hi @winnieponcelet! In case you are interested in starting a partnerlab more information can be found here: https://waag.org/en/news/biohack-academy-call-partner-labs
I’ll also send you our “Coordinators Guide” via email, which contains all the details on the required infrastructure, costs and marketing approaches.
The best that works for us is to go to events and use our own to promote the academy. I am also a teacher at the royal art academy, and it turns out that students are often also interested in taking part in our course outside of their regular program.
Next there are also local “life science” / “biotech” networks of science parks and national organisations which I also approach.
Hey Pieter,
did you ever do any ‘evaluation’ of the lab equipment that the participants built during the Biohackademy? I’d be really interested which designs work best in this kind of setting and how they are used afterwards.
Greetings!!
@haho16 you built some of the stuff, right? Who else? And how was your experience?
Hi Julian, basically each program we do is an ‘evaluation’. The device have been designed with the criteria of affordability, ease of reproduction and demonstration of basic functionality in mind. The intention of the course is that participants “hack” the designs and either improve it or use the inspiration to make something that fit their own needs. I get emails on nearly a weekly basis of people that are building the designs too. Last week from University of Zaragoza for example. Here are some examples of what participants have build:
https://biohackwa.github.io/projects/
https://mayujie.gitbooks.io/gitbook/content/week3.html