We publicized our project to both low-aged children, high school students and general public through several activities.
For Kids Aged 7-13 - Exhibition
For kids aged 7 to 13, we held an exhibition for a full day in Shenzhen Youth Activity Center in order to convey the knowledge of intestinal tract covered in our project to more children. We used the same area for exhibition with the iGEM team from Peking University. Through this cooperation, we exchanged experience of publicity and gained many valuable information. We also gave them meaningful insights on how to attract kids of younger ages.
During the process of our exhibition, we held two lectures on the theme "The Formation of Farts" at 2p.m. and 4p.m. res; the speakers of these two lectures were William and Shea. Since the audience of our lectures were children younger than 12 years old, we designed a lot of Q&A and other interactive sessions through these lectures so that children could understand this knowledge more easily. During the lectures well guided by William and Shea, we received active responses from the audience. We believed that after these two interesting popular science lectures, many children would have a deeper understanding of intestinal knowledge.
Through the whole exhibition, we kept holding a game for children in the Activity Center. We provided pigments with different colors and large papers for children to draw only by hands but not pens. When children drew, our team members kept guiding them by asking some questions about the intestinal knowledge, so children could draw the pathway on how E. Coli produces ammonia. Therefore, at the last of our exhibition, with our members' leading, there were two colorful drawing boards created by children showing their understanding of intestine and fart.
For teenagers aged 15 to 18 - High School Activity
For teenagers aged 15 to 18, our team also cooperated with our school (International Department, the Affiliated High School of South China Normal University) 's biology club (known as Lillian Biology Kingdom) to promote our project on campus. The objects of this promotion were mainly high school students, and several middle school students also attended the Club Fair. In order to let more high school students learn about synthetic biology, our team made a roll up banner introducing the project of our group. Many students were interested in our project and asked about the principles and effects of it.
In addition to the publicity on the Club Fair, our team also delivered our questionnaires to students on campus. In this way, we not only collected data of students' opinions and suggestions but also informed more people of our project. In the questionnaire, our group included knowledge on enterostomy so that more high school students could understand the difficulties patients who had taken enterostomy confronted every day. Therefore, the social significance of our project is better understood by more high school students.
For General Public - Media Publicity
Since March of 2019, our team has been publishing articles through Wechat's Official account. The purpose was to publicize our project and the principles lying behind the project design. In the early period of our project, in order to provide the chance for more people to learn about synthetic biology and genetic engineering, we introduced several successful and meaningful iGEM projects in recent years, including the projects of UCSD 2018, NTHU Formosa 2018, and SJTU-BioX-Shanghai 2018.
Later, we published the description of our project. In the article, we introduced the social needs of our project, which were relieving the embarrassment of farting in public places and reducing social embarrassment of patients who had received enterostony operation. Also, we briefly introduced three main parts of the genetic engineering pathways in out projects in the article.
After introducing our projects, we posted the results of our human practices, including the survey results, the promotion video, and so forth.
There are totally more than 2800 clicks for our articles. Our highest-viewed article is the article that introduces our project, which received almost 800 views. The number of people who follow our official account is constantly growing and reached around 150 till October 19th.
We also posted our promotion video on Bilibili, the largest video platform for youth in China. Our video received 1600+ views.
