Team:CSMU Taiwan/Education
Education
Our plan for education aimed at audiences who actively approach themselves to scientific knowledge, and we divided them into three groups: elementary school, junior high, and senior high students. We hoped to deliver synthetic biology-related knowledge and peak their interests in science. However, as students, we clearly understand how boring it is to munch on the bulk of scientific knowledge. Thus, we customized different content according to our audience's age and background knowledge. We added in a lot of hands-on experiments and activities to let our audience learn while playing, and ensure that we are constantly interacting and hearing from them.
We invited students from an advanced science class in a nearby elementary school to our lab. Considered that the kids may lack basic biological knowledge to fully understand synthetic biology, we offer them materials surrounding the topic of " the central dogma" instead, which introduced the principle and mechanism of gene transcription and translation. Besides paperwork, we also offered the opportunity to conduct electrophoresis experiments on their own. By operating pipet and reading the codon catalog, the students learned the cornerstone of synthetic biology and even got to know some of the common bacteria used in the field.
Our aim for this event was to introduce synthetic biology and some of its commonly conducted experiments. Similar to the lab tour for elementary school students, we hosted one for junior high school students as well, but with more experiments this time, including plasmid extraction and PCR. Considered that the students had already learned about and had a rough idea of some basic biology, we started the session straightforwardly by explaining the protocol of experiments and demonstrating the usage of several laboratory tools. While waiting for the experimental results, we took the time to go through the process of gene cloning, which is a highlighted keypoint in synthetic biology. By leading them to go through every step and obtain the results successfully, we not only had a chance to train the experimental skills of our own but also got to reexamine our protocols and mend the flaws. To sum up, with us being greatly affected by the students' enthusiasm for lab work and them having gained a great deal of hands-on experience, we all benefitted from this event a lot.
This event covered two main values: introducing synthetic biology from iGEMers' viewpoint and passing on the spirit of iGEM. As CSMU is in proximity to Ming Dao High School, we value the importance of science education for their students greatly. We, with a huge enthusiasm toward the iGEM competition,
wanted to share what we've learned throughout the year and encourage them to depart on their journey of biomedicine. Consequently, we held a workshop, introduced synthetic biology, and shared our practical experiences in the manner of wet lab, dry lab, and human practice.
We truly hope their eagerness of learning can be ignited by our efforts, and that they could become successful iGEMers in the future.
See also: Collaborations
In order to educate the general population about synthetic biology, we decided to give out presentations to high school students who were prospective biomedical or medical students. We introduced some basic concepts of synthetic biology and current popular techniques for modifying gene sequences, and we talked about the iGEM competition in hopes of bringing inspiration to them as they could be potential attendees in the future. By engaging with the high school students, we gained a new perspective of what others perceived synthetic biology and their concerns by answering questions that arose throughout the sessions. One of the main concerns was safety during the experiments and the applicability of the lab result in real-life situations. By using synthetic biology we could potentially produce new variants and new traits that would yield a much different species than if it were to be developed through natural selection which is a safety issue. Overall, this was a successful event as the students were able to gain new knowledge and we were also able to obtain feedback and use as precautions when constructing our project.
Public Engagement
Apart from educating students, we also took the responsibility to promote synthetic biology to the public. As our audience may not come from SynBio-related backgrounds and tend to engage themselves with scientific knowledge passively, we took the initiative to reach out to them. To do so, we promoted our topics of concern, including SynBio and oral cancer issues, on social media and also produced films in attempts to let textbook content be more amusing and understandable. Interested in how we display and deliver synthetic biology? Scroll down to discover!
We started to manage our social media accounts in April 2020 on Facebook and Instagram. It was by then that we realized our capability and responsibility of spreading information about synthetic biology to the public as we were constantly being in touch with the scientific knowledge. Our accounts mainly introduced the iGEM competition, defined synthetic biology, and gave more details of it. However, we gradually figured that we could do more rather than introduce synthetic biology alone. Therefore we added a lot more topics related to our project itself. Our posts covered several topics, including:
- The introduction of synthetic biology
- Details of our project
- Information on oral cancer
- Activities beyond the lab
- Experimental guidelines
- iGEMers' daily life
We drew illustrations for every post to display the concepts more clearly and kept the caption as lively and brief as we could. We updated our posts on a weekly basis so that our audience could frequently gain information from us and gradually learned who we are. Moreover, we included both English and Chinese captions to ensure our followers, local and foreign alike, understand what we hoped to promote and also as an attempt to widen our audience to more regions globally. So far, we've been updating our accounts for months. We saw that our followers have increased from two hundred to five hundred people, our informative posts were often saved by them, and that people often left comments saying they gained information from the posts. We are confident to say that our followers are truly learning from our posts and that we are showing excellence in spreading scientific knowledge.
We spend a morning visiting the National Education Radio and were interviewed about our iGEM project. This opportunity to be on air was very precious to us because it is a way to let us be heard by a much broader audience. The interview was carried out in four aspects: (1) the iGEM competition, (2) synthetic biology, (3) oral cancer, and (4) our project (miRNA.DOC). As the main audience of the National Education Radio was perhaps office workers who don't necessarily possess basic understandings about biology, we brought out the contents in simple words and avoid using proper nouns. Through the process of answering questions from the host, we got to organize our thoughts and be more certain of the strength and limitations of synthetic biology. As for our audience, we were sure they've gained a lot of new understandings of the Biomed field and hopefully be eager to learn more ever since.
It is greatly encouraged in the iGEM competition to work with other teams collaboratively. Therefore, we joined the invitation of iGEM TU Delft from Neverland to co-create a film with them and many other iGEM teams from the world. In the film, iGEM TU Delft introduced iGEM as a global community that strives to impact through the tools of SynBio, following with a carousel of each team elaborating on their project topic and vision. By the potential influence of numerous teams starring in the film, it is reasonably anticipated that the film would reach out to the mass public. Besides the marvelous work, it is noteworthy that our team added Traditional Chinese subtitles to the video to let it be seen and accepted by an even wider audience. We believed for the public, this film has reached a significant achievement to deliver synthetic biology as a specific and clear subject, and thus greatly aided the public to be better acquainted with synthetic biology.
See also: Collaborations