Team:CAU China/ScienceCommunication&Education /SyntheticBiologyfromScratchonlinelivelesson0





Synthetic Biology from Scratch online live lesson
Details
    Due to the COVID-19 and the popularization of online education, as an alternative to offline teaching, we have jointly conducted a 6-day online online session with the iGEM team from five universities ------ Tsinghua University, Peking University, Beijing Normal University, and Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. Live teaching is aimed at preaching synthetic biology to the group of middle and high school students, aiming to disseminate the background knowledge and future prospects of synthetic biology. The entire course was broadcast live on Bilibili from 8.5-8.10 evenings from 7:30-9:00, and we simultaneously promoted it on the WeChat official account. In addition, the complete video of each course is uploaded on Bilibili for everyone to review. Our courses include introduction to synthetic biology, synthetic biology and new technology/medicine, synthetic biology and agriculture, synthetic biology and energy, synthetic biology and information/art, synthetic biology and industry/environment, etc. Our team is responsible for synthetic biology and agriculture/food. Through the combination of knowledge and project cases, people can enrich their understanding of synthetic biology from a perspective that is closer to life.

    This event has received huge social attention. We have received support from the Education and Research Center of the Beijing Municipal Education Commission, Xicheng District, Shunyi District, Shijingshan District, Fengtai District, and Daxing District Education Commission Education and Research Center. The scope of publicity basically covers high school biology teachers from Beijing’s eight districts, and the average number of listeners per live broadcast are about 3,500 , and the cumulative number of listeners is about 20,000.

Effect
    According to the results of the feedback questionnaire after each live broadcast, our joint live broadcast courses have achieved satisfactory results. The questionnaire is released and collected by Wunjuanxing. Viewers can fill in the feedback questionnaire by scanning the QR code in the recording and broadcasting, and the following are the statistical results of our questionnaire.

Figure 1 The results of the survey on the types of people participating in this live broadcast synthesis

    A total of 131 valid feedback questionnaires were collected for this activity, of which 67% were middle school students, 27% were college students and above (including graduate students and doctoral students), and 6% were teachers.

Figure 2 Participating groups' awareness of synthetic biology after participating in this live course

Figure 3 Participating groups' awareness of iGEM after participating in this live broadcast course

    Most of the groups who filled out the questionnaire had a low level of understanding of synthetic biology and iGEM. After the explanation of our course, everyone has a deeper understanding of synthetic biology and iGEM.

Figure 4 Regarding the participation satisfaction scores of the participating groups for this event

Figure 5 Ratings of interest and satisfaction of participating groups towards synthetic students and iGEM

    The harvest satisfaction and interest satisfaction survey showed that the average harvest satisfaction score was 3.96 points (out of 5 points), and 65% of the respondents indicated that they had achieved greater gains; the average interest satisfaction score was 3.97 points (out of 5 points). 74% of respondents said that their interest in synthetic biology and iGEM has greatly increased.

Summary
    In this event, we made full use of the more and more popular online live broadcast format, and gained a high degree of activity. It can be said to be a very good attempt. We have explored a way to promote synthetic biology to the public. Brand new platform. We have summarized some experiences for the subsequent teams, hoping to help teams who intend to use similar methods in the future:

    1. About the depth and interaction of the course.

    This teaching activity is mainly for middle school students, so the content of the course is not difficult. As a popular science course, the most important thing is to leave the audience with an impression of synthetic biology and iGEM competition. Therefore, when explaining the project, it is more important to focus on functionality, practicality and fun.

    Online teaching has produced a new form of interaction-comments and barrage. We will design questions and ask the audience questions. Of course, we can also consider adding fun to the live content, such as adding interactive games.

    2. About the teaching time.

    TIn the form of live teaching, you can consider shortening the live time based on the length of offline teaching, because the form of online teaching tends to make the audience feel tired and lack a sense of participation. In addition, we recommend adding interesting video materials to the teaching process to arouse the enthusiasm of the audience. And when uploading a recorded course, consider uploading the video in chapters to make the content classification clearer.