Education
Due to the impact of the COVID-19, in the early stages of this year’s competition, offline lectures and other forms that were often held in the past could not be carried out, so we began to focus on using online new media methods to promote related science.
The research
In the past work, the new media platforms commonly used by the BIT team are Weibo, bilibili, WeChat and twitter. However, except for the WeChat, the science popularization effects of other platforms are average, so this year the BIT team hopes to investigate the science popularization environment of the two platforms Weibo and bilibili through specific research reports to summarize the past experience of the BIT team's online publicity work , And decides the online work center of the BIT team in the future, and hopes to provide help to other iGEM teams in China through this research report, and help other teams better conduct popular science publicity work.
In the report, the BIT team conducted research on Weibo and the bilibili platform. Compared with Wechat, these two platforms can allow more people to access our popular science content, and the audience is wider than wechat.
Weibo is a traditional platform with text as its main carrier, and the content of popular science is basically text + pictures. After investigation, the BIT team found that the Weibo platform is not suitable for science popularization. After conducting research using the more famous Weibo account @Doctor Dingxiang as a typical example, we found that the Weibo platform does not provide relevant support for popular science content due to its own business reasons, and will also invade the survival of popular science content due to other aspects. space. Therefore, the BIT team seeks a platform that is more suitable for the release of popular science content.
For this reason, the BIT team deliberately investigated the bilibili. According to research, although there are not a big UP who He is doing popular science work in igem, synthetic biology or medicine and have a large number of fans, the same video playback volume is relatively low, but it can be obtained through “likes /watching”, most of the videos are about 0.1, which means that one in every 10 people thinks this video is useful to them, far exceeding the order of Weibo. Similarly, in 2020.6.5, the bilibili opened a new partition for the first time: the knowledge zone, and a series of related activities such as the "knowledge sharing officer" to support the newcomer UP master to create content.
Not only that, the BIT team also cooperated with SCUT_China on this research report, and jointly wrote a more comprehensive science popularization research report, hoping to help more teams better conduct popular science publicity work.
Not only that, the BIT team also cooperated with SCUT_China on this research report, and jointly wrote a more comprehensive science popularization research report, hoping to help more teams better conduct popular science publicity work.
(The WIKI address of team SCUT_China: (https://2020.igem.org/Team:SCUT_China/Education)
Based on the data and demonstrations in these research reports, team BIT decided to reduce the usual text-based science popularization and shift the focus of work to the production of related videos.
Therefore, the BIT team produced a series of videos for popularization of science.
Science for All Alliance
At the same time, the collaborations with SCUT-China prompted us to conduct multiple conference calls on education, and our views coincided. Therefore, we established the "Science for All Alliance" together with UESTC-Software who has the same idea.
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The original intention of the Science for All Alliance was to help each team better conduct popular science publicity activities. The Science for All Alliance hopes to form a community with popular science activities as the main content, and provide a platform to provide more opportunities and inspiration for all teams.
We temporarily choose this logo as the LOGO of Science for All Alliance. The LOGO adopts the traditional Chinese ink and wash style, and uses the Chinese character "普" as the main element. The word "普" means "universal", which means that everyone has the opportunity to be exposed. This coincides with the theme of our Science for All Alliance. Not only that, the character "普" in Chinese also means "multiple suns are shining in the sky". The Science for All Alliance believes that all teams should unite, just like multiple suns, to jointly carry out more high-quality science popularization work, so that more people can see our glory. Science for All Alliance has a complete organizational structure to carry out all aspects of work.
Science for All Alliance is divided into five functional departments: New Media Department, Outreach Department, Organization Department, General Affairs Department and Mutual Evaluation Committee.
As a popular science work alliance, the work of the New Media Department is very important. The new media department is divided into two parts: the manuscript group and the video group, which correspond to text-based science content and video-based science content. The manuscript group is not only responsible for producing corresponding text-based science content, but also responsible for contacting other teams and reprinting relevant content. The video team is not only responsible for the production of video science content, but also for contacting other teams to reprint excellent content. The manuscript team is responsible for operating the WeChat account and Zhihu account, and the video team is responsible for operating the bilibili account.
The outreach part is the international exchange group and the enterprise group. The international exchange team is responsible for getting in touch with excellent foreign teams, and strive to translate their work content to the country, so that more people can benefit. The enterprise group is responsible for contacting domestic and foreign enterprises, media, etc., to provide everyone with a larger and more diverse platform for popular science work. The organization part is activity group and cooperation group. The activity group is responsible for organizing larger regional gatherings. The cooperation group is responsible for helping various teams cooperate to carry out a series of branded science popularization activities.
The General Affairs Department is responsible for the management of the entire alliance, and is responsible for the changes, approval of activities, and fund management.
At the same time, in order to better help each team improve the quality of science popularization work, Science for All Alliance established a mutual evaluation committee, inviting people with different professional backgrounds and educational backgrounds to join the committee to evaluate each science popularization work. By collecting voices from different angles, we can help more people participate in popular science work, showing the unique diversity and Inclusivity of Science for All Alliance.
As the number of participating teams increases, Science for All Alliance hopes to:
1. Use the public account of "Science for All Alliance" to submit video and other promotional materials on major platforms. Having an official account recognized by the platform can better obtain support and allow related works to be seen by more people. At the same time, We hope to get in touch with many outstanding teams from other countries through the name of "Science for All Alliance", and introduce more non-Chinese content translations to China, so that the work of iGEMers can help more people. At the same time, the public account of Science for All Alliance will also back up the materials and content provided by iGEMers.
2. Science for All Alliance hopes to invite experts from all parties, iGEMer and ordinary students to set up committees to evaluate the content published by "Science for All Alliance" on various platforms. Because there are many intellectual problems in the popular science content done by many teams. The Science for All Alliance hopes to help iGEMers participating in the Science for All Alliance to improve the quality of science popularization work by establishing a mutual evaluation system.
3. Science for All Alliance will contact enterprises, media, etc. as a group, and provide iGEMers with a larger and more professional platform to conduct popular science publicity activities. At the same time, Science for All Alliance will also hold a series of activities as a group to help each team to preserve and pass on their own special activities into a system, on a large scale.
4. Science for All Alliance hopes to provide a platform for teams to communicate and cooperate with each other. The Science for All Alliance hopes to build a community, provide opportunities and platforms for cooperation between teams with similar ideas, and help everyone better conduct popular science publicity work.
Science for All Alliance has just started, and we hope that more teams will join us and work together to raise the science popularization work to a new height!
Team inheritance—“course to iGEM”、 “Student to teacher”
Not only that, in order to ensure that the popular science publicity work we have done can continue in the future, as we mentioned in the research report, to become a brand, we are very concerned about the issue of team inheritance. To this end, we contacted the team BIT_China and cooperated. The issue of team inheritance mentioned in the human practice conducted by the team BIT_China in 2019 aroused our interest. The results of the team BIT_China show that most of the iGEMers believe that participating in iGEM has brought them a lot of help in study and life, and many people were willing to continue the next year's competition at the beginning, but most of them failed to participate. The next year's game. The results of the BIT_China team questionnaire show that most teams do not have effective methods to motivate team members to stay. This made the BIT team think about how to make the team members willing to stay and how to motivate the team members. Therefore, we want to understand why iGEMers are willing to participate in iGEM.
According to the results of the questionnaire, most iGEMers believe that iGEM is a training for future research work and an excellent opportunity to communicate with more teams. At the same time, most iGEMers don't think it is important to get an award through iGEM for higher education.
Similarly, when asking most iGEMers what they think is the most valuable content they have obtained in iGEM, most iGEMers also think so.Most iGEMers believe that participating in iGEM to train their scientific research capabilities is vital to them.
Through this questionnaire survey, combined with the results of the BIT_China team in 2019, we believe that if we can establish a "course to iGEM" and "student to teacher" system, it may be possible to increase the team members to participate in another year The passion of iGEM.
At the same time, due to the impact of the COVID-19, many universities have switched to online courses. Therefore, during our online process, we prioritize the learning needs of our team members and the students' course expertise. The BIT team combines online learning to be members of the team, students from the college, and students from the entire school. A series of courses combined with professional courses have been prepared to help students learn more professional knowledge from their own knowledge background, and also be able to understand iGEM and synthetic biology in the process. Similarly, these courses were taught by iGEMers from the past team BIT. At the same time, we also held trial lectures in the team members after class to help the team members better understand the content of the course, and at the same time exercise their ability to explain relevant content for new team members in the future. Similarly, we shared these contents on the bilibili platform to help more students learn and understand related aspects.
After the COVID-19 was brought under control and the school started, the BIT team also carried out many offline activities to carry out related popular science publicity work.
In order to call on everyone to exercise and improve immunity after the COVID-19 is under control in China, the BIT team deliberately held the first igem_BIT badminton game, calling on students from all colleges to participate in this activity and exercise together. At the same time, during the break, we also introduced the team BIT's project this year for the students who came to watch the game, listened to their opinions and suggestions, and introduced them to iGEM and synthetic biology. Because these students have different professional backgrounds, we hope that through such an activity, we can help more students understand igem, understand synthetic biology, and bring the intersection of thinking between different disciplines in the future.
For future
In order to better attract students from different professional backgrounds to learn about iGEM and synthetic biology, and to introduce iGEM to new students who have just come university, team BIT specially carried out a popular science promotion at the club’s recruitment activities. We not only introduced to freshmen, we also attracted students from other clubs around to listen to our introduction to this year's projects. Everyone is very interested in our project and also asked us to explain the projects we have done in the past, so we also introduced last year's projects and introduced the hardware work of team BIT. These freshmen and schoolmates from other clubs come from different professional backgrounds. We hope to attract more by introducing the characteristics of the iGEM competition, introducing the characteristics of the BIT team's biology and hardware combination, and introducing what we are doing in the past and now. We want this students will participate in the iGEM competition, participate in the research in the field of synthetic biology, and bring new impetus to the development of synthetic biology with more professional thinking methods.
Also, we do a series of coffee time for freshman. We held these lectures with BIT-China to help freshmen learn more about the iGEM competition through the presentations of the two teams. Help students who want to understand synthetic biology find a research direction that is more suitable for them.
Therefore, it can be concluded that in terms of education, the 2020 BIT team worked in three area:
First, the BIT team hopes to work with other teams to jointly write related science popularization platforms, popular science content, and popular science recommendation manuals related to popular science audiences, so as to help each team better conduct popular science publicity work.
Second, the BIT team hopes to increase the enthusiasm of the team members for participating in the next year by establishing a system of "courses to iGEM" and "students to teachers", and to promote related science popularization work derived from these systems for the next year Train iGEMer in advance.
Third, the BIT team hopes to introduce more students with different professional backgrounds to attract students with more academic backgrounds to participate in iGEM and provide more inspiration.
Created By Beijing Institute of Technology