Team:ASTWS-China/Education

Introduction

We explored and utilized concepts of synthetic biology via iGEM, realizing its practicability and huge potential over various fields. However, to the majority of people, it is still a complex subject hidden in mystery. In order to convey general knowledge of synthetic biology to a wider range of people, we designed a series of Education & Public Engagement towards different groups of people and hoped to build a platform to interact with the public as well as improve our project.

Info Session for students

Face to face talk

Zoe, Cheryl and Tough, on behalf of ASTWS-China, gave lectures to two groups of teenagers in biological summer camp called BioX on August 3 and August 23, respectively. The majority of participants in BioX Camp were high school students who decided to major in biology in the college or have intense interest toward biology. They were capable of basic comprehension of synthetic biology, so we included professional knowledge in our presentation.

Firstly, Zoe introduced them iGEM and the general idea of our experimental design. She underscored the strong relationship between our approach and synthetic biology. Then, Cheryl concretely elaborated our gene circuit, including what function each chain served as well as how these sub chains were connected and performed. She also explained the mechanisms of our gene engineering E.coli and mentioned the current achievements of our experiments and showed pictures of our samples and results. At last, Tough discussed the progress on human practice. He listed actually result of the plastic processing rate that was derived though the field trip to over 10 waste processing factories. Addition of that, he further shared his appreciation of the delightfulness, friendships, communication skills he obtained from the iGEM. By sharing our personal experience of iGEM, we refreshed the impression of students in BioX Camp to synthetic biology and felt proud of ourselves for conveying knowledge to students with similar interest.

Online seminar

Another meaningful online activity was achieved with the help of Worldshaper-Shanghai 2020 iGEM team. We attended one of their series of lectures in a Bio-club of Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy. Because the students of this Bio-club are interested in synthetic biology, they are eager to know how to use synthetic biology in the real world. So the main goal of this online seminar is to show students the possibilities of synthetic biology through projects by different iGEM teams.

We mainly show the experimental progress and experimental principle of biofilm enrichment and degradation of nanoplastics, which has brought great inspiration to the students there. We also found that the students were very interested in iGEM, so we took the time to describe some of our achievements and experiences in the competition so far, which encouraged everyone here. We hope that more high school students like us can discover their potential and contribute to the world through the subjects they are interested in.

Communicate with public directly

On August 23, we hold a technology exhibition at the opening ceremony of Hangzhou Science and Technology Activity Week. There were two other iGEM teams, Worldshaper-Shanghai and Worldshaper-Nanjing, attended to the activity, too. The exhibition provided an extraordinary chance to popularize synthetic biology and iGEM to the public. Each team is able to present their project in details and receive reflections from groups of different scientific level, and thus reach mutual benefits to the largest extent. Accordingly, we attach importance to this event.

In order to convey knowledge efficiently as well as present a good team image, we were in meticulous preparation for weeks. Firstly, we collaborate with two other teams for poster design and set-up, roll-up banners and other necessity for the presentation. We even made 100 portable pamphlets with information of our team, the objective of our project, our experiment progress and social media account etc.

Secondly, we came up with two methods to attract children and adults, respectively. As for children, we designed a darts game for children to simulate the decomposition process of nanoplastics. We compared our target as a water body, darts as our gene engineering strains. The points they derived by throwing darts represent the percentage of nanoplastics that our strains have decomposed in the water body. If the participated children finished listening to our demonstration after the game, they can earn prizes according to their score. As for adults, we set up a well-designed poster where basic information of our project and experiment are shown, and therefore attract people with interest to come over.

The exhibition was a huge success. Our specialized methods function effectively, especially the one for kids. Children aged from 5 to 16, some with their parents, were so into the game and the presentation. They asked for more rounds and even came up with questions like “What does your strain look like” or “So how do we decompose more nanoplastics?” During the presentation, adults also show intense interest to our project. Some parents accompanied their kids to join the game and subscribed our social media account for further details. Several undergraduates from local university shared their view and suggestions of our project. We luckily met Professor Wu from the Environmental Science Department of Zhejiang University and exchange opinions. He pointed out a potential problem concerning to the feasibility of our bacteria strain in waste disposal pool and sincerely proposed improvements to our project.

It was really glad to see both children and adults engaging and interacting actively. Meanwhile, we received suggestions from domain experts and gained a clearer view of our project.

Conclusively, the exhibition was not only an excellent opportunity to propagate our project, but a perfect place to exchange and learn knowledge as well.

Self-media platform

Moreover, in order to share our experiences and knowledge of attending iGEM, we publicized our project and researching processes in social media platforms (WeChat, Twitter, Weibo). To endow readers a holistic approach to our project and experiment, we posted several popular science articles, discussing synthetic biology and concrete principles of our experiment. We have also uploaded vlogs, which record our field trips and lives in labs. Followed pictures are the examples we published on these social platforms.