Team:GreatBay SCIE/Public Engagement and Education Outreach
Overview
To lead our project into a participative state for all year groups and various fields of individuals to take part in, we focused our public engagement in five highly diversified events including questionnaires, student workshops, presentations, our regular updates on our official account, and our self-designed iGEM board games. By accomplishing these engagement projects, we succeed in advertising our iGEM project to a greater variety of people differ on gender, religion, age, social class, and race. For different year groups, we’ve designed a variety of highly engaging activities suitable for each person interested in Synthetic biology to participate. We hope to collect public opinions about our project through the questionnaire and learn about some of the public’s misunderstandings about synthetic biology. We have written several public account articles to explain these misunderstandings to eliminate the misconceptions as much as possible. We also have a wide range of biochemistry-related activities, such as our fun self-made card game to help iGEM newcomers understand the iGEM competition system and samples. We have taught primary school students who have the eagerness to learn about biochemistry hand by hand. We did some basic yet entertaining experiments together and went through the rules of the laboratory to mitigate the risk. Another important engagement project we succeeded in doing is the presentation in Bluepha lab, by presenting our design and ideas and asking for options from experiments, we gathered many improvement advice and proceeded our project to the next level. We also further improved our toolbox by letting the public try out our model and asking about their experience. By such, we reconstructed our toolbox to more portable and concise for greater public use.
In addition, we have included the "Excellence in Another Area" page for our Public Engagement and Education part, with our original iGEM-themed Board Game and iGEM Song Parodies.
Excellence in Another Area >
Questionnaire
According to the research, most citizens attempting the research don't have a thorough understanding of local fungi species, which is a common issue for the public (Fig.1). On the other hand, they believe that mushroom toxins are lethal, which is a good sign of public safety education (Fig.2). Most people have safety awareness to prevent picking wild mushrooms (Fig.3). However, in southwest China, some wild mushrooms are seen as fine food. Due to the aspects above, our product is designed to help people who pick wild mushrooms for a living to figure out whether a mushroom is poisonous or not, without requiring them to be experts in mushrooms.
Figure 1. Can you recognize local mushrooms in your area?
Figure 2. Do you believe that eating poisonous mushrooms will cause people’s death?
Figure 3. Will you eat or pick up wild mushrooms?
We raised a question to ask the public about whether synthetic biology has more advantages or disadvantages. Nowadays, due to the quick development of synthetic biology, it is widely used in many fields including agriculture, industry, and medicine. More than half of the volunteers have heard about this subject before (Fig.4), but science programs are still needed to influence more people to understand what synthetic biology is. We have made efforts and arranged public activities to promote this cause.
Figure 4. Have you ever heard about synthetic biology?
In the volunteers, people who have knowledge about synthetic biology agreed that it can have great uses in medical sciences and molecular biology (Fig.5), and most of them agreed that synthetic biology has more advantages than disadvantages (Fig.6). People are basically optimistic towards synthetic biology, however, most of them still think that it is a little dangerous (Fig.7) and some people are concerned about the potential ethical issues and damages to the environment that may be caused by synthetic biology (Fig.8).
Figure 5. Which field do you think that syn-bio can be applied in?
Figure 6. Do you agree that the advantages of synthetic biology overweight disadvantages?
Figure 7. How dangerous do you think syn-bio is?
Figure 8. Why do you believe that syn-bio’s con is over pro?
Aiming at possible concerns of the public, we designed some questions to find out which problems that people worry most about. We gathered people's ideas of genetically modified food. In the results, we can see that 65.1% of the volunteers accept it, but still, a relatively big number of people have worries about its safety, for they think that it may cause health problems (Fig.9).
Synthetic Biology Education For Children
Synthetic biology education towards children.
Biologists have long been concerned about biology education in children, and the subject is indeed of great importance since a cascade of new fields is studied in unprecedented depth. Therefore, we, like senior high school students, who had acquaintance with biology rather late felt that we should undertake the obligation to help to introduce the young generation to the world of biology. We hope this would raise interest in our potential researchers in the future, which may ultimately generate more great pioneers in the road of science.
We found that lectures may not be the best choice, as our audiences are mainly pupils from primary schools, around the age of 7-12. It was very challenging to design the event – one with enough academic content but should not be long and tedious. We decided that we should carry out various experiments that are basic to the advanced yet inspiring to those who were new. The event was originally hosted by Bluepha Lab and staged in the Youth Activity Centre in Shenzhen. We led the children participants through the extraction of fruit DNA and agarose gel electrophoresis.
TED talk
Although one sees the tremendous present and potential applications of synthetic biology in numerous fields, including but not limited to biology, some misunderstandings that have set foot in the general public persist. Gene editing is more than often falsely reported by media from negative views, as they mistakenly over-estimated the risk of having it involved in our daily lives. Therefore, one of our main intentions is to eliminate these misconceives through various means.
To gather more information and engage with a wider public, we cooperated with the TED club in our school to perform a TED talk (Fig.10). Most of our audience is junior students who are interested in cutting-edge technologies and adults who are not working in the field of biology. We strongly believe that through both educating the young generation and informing the matured ones, we are able to diminish some misunderstandings owing to a lack of knowledge by bringing them out of the media cycle and look from another standpoint. To make our speech comprehensible, we started from conveying basic biological knowledge to presenting our project, with emphasis on bio-safeties.
Figure 10. A screenshot from the video recording of our TED talk. The video, unfortunately, could not be uploaded owing to its size.
Figure 11. A group photo taken after the talk, which includes some of our team members and some of the TED club in our school.
Lab tour
We invited students of our iGEM ECA, from our high school to the lab, and toured them around to show them how to operate laboratory appliances, like centrifugal machines and DNA electrophoresis apparatus. We demonstrate to them how to add samples to the pores of agarose gel, and involved them in the experiment. We also gave a short presentation about our project and organized a little workshop about immunology and antibody science. We engaged our students with the P1 lab environment and their enthusiasm for synthetic biology is reinforced.
Figure 12. A photo taken in the tour by one of our team members.
Project Introduction via SCIE's WeChat Official Account
To conduct propaganda, we had sent several articles about our project through SCIE's official account, which certain interesting details about our project can be efficiently disseminated among other students and even some of their parents.
These articles had almost totally recorded the overall processes of our project, by tracing each step of our hardware, experimental thoughts, and human practice, these introduction articles not only let other students and teachers get to know more about our experiments but even teach other schoolmates who have always been interested in the iGEM project much professional and typical knowledge about our iGEM competition. Through this introducing platform, about 5000 people viewed our project, and this definitely helped us a lot in the popularizing part.
Presentation in Bluepha Lab summer camp
Gratefully, we had a chance to present our project to synthetic biology beginners in BluePha Lab, where we carried out all our experiments, in a biology camp they held. We hoped that this would help them understand iGEM and the role of synthetic biology to a deeper extent, as most of them stepped into the field of synthetic biology just now. What pleased us is that they seem to be highly concerned with biosafety in the Q&A session. We believe that only when researchers take full responsibility for their project can they become prominent ones, and the fact that they do care should be considered as a good sign.
Our Own Official WeChat Account
We have our own official account to popularise our iGEM project. Within this official media, we have continually updated fascinating details about our project, and also shared certain interesting daily experiment routines via this account. Our questionnaires are also sent out through this account. We will insist on updating more amusing knowledge about the iGEM competition and processes in near future.
Our Bilibili Account
In order to provide an entertaining way to let more people get to know about us, we also created a fabulous video on a famous video platform in China, Bilibili, to popularize our project aims, as well as all the fun we had in our iGEM experience.
We used the most straightforward way to show our project processes to the audience by sketching step diagrams and making them into videos. These videos can help people who tend to know more about this project a lot to some extent. We also created a series of iGEM-themed song parodies, to show our audience all the happy & sad moments of our year of scientific research.
Surprisingly, we had received several pieces of feedback from the audience on our videos. They thought that through our first video was quite exquisite and detailed, it did set a relatively high threshold of knowledge for synthetic biology, so they could not understand our project background well. In order to let our propaganda video become more interesting and understandable to the public, we created another brand-new music video to show more about our project, we tended to make use of a type of 'childish' way to make our project look more amusing to the normal internet users in the website, and got much more positive feedback and viewing numbers because of this refinement in the way of carrying out our public engagement.
Our synthetic biology workshop.
iGEM ECA(Extra-Curricular activities) in SCIE & Workshop
As school season approaches, we felt the immediate need to intrigue our peers with Synthetic Biology. Therefore, we opened an extracurricular club, directly named SCIE iGEM, where we teach our younger peers about Synthetic Biology, Bioengineering, and scientific research skills.
We organized a small workshop and invited a few new students of SCIE iGEM in to discuss Synthetic Biology on behalf of the ECA before it officially starts. We had a long talk about ethical principles. Ethic is going to be increasingly debating in the future as Synthetic Biology development progresses, so it is important to make the freshmen aware of the importance and some principles in this topic. We were lucky and honored to have invited our advisor Alexis, the leader of the iGEM highschool team GreatBay_China 2018 at the workshop. She intrigued our new students by expanding the topic of ethics to social aspects. After this workshop, it is guaranteed that the members are not only familiar with synthetic biology general concepts, but also fascinated by the possibilities of what SynBio can bring to all human beings.
Our Weekly ECA sessions.
Regular activities of the iGEM club had also begun, with our team members sharing knowledge on synthetic biology and iGEM.