About Education and Public Engagement, we wanted to introduce synthetic biology and our poroject to the society,raising awareness of oral health problems. Thus, we started to think about the easiest way to achieve our goal, then we came up with designing a board game about biology. With the game, players can understand what biology is easily. Then we went to a elementary school nearby to teach them how to play the game, and it turned out to be a big success. Through the activity, we found that with games and practicum, students learn things more quickly. Therefore we went on to the next activity, practical workshop. The workshop is the major part of STEAM FAIR, a series of scientific courses. In there, students can learn how to operate easy experiments of biotechnology. In addition, to let the participants understand how to apply synthetic biology, we made an animation and play it during the practical workshop. After the event, some of the participants applied to become one of the members of iGEM Mingdao 2021. Then some of our members give them a lesson about what is "iGEM", and what we were doing then. When our project is drawing to a close, we held an intramural presentation to introduce our project to all the students, teachers, and our parents. Throughout all the activities above, we inspired many younger students and led them step into the boundless ocean of science. That's what we expected and glad to see.
Education project in Chiao-Jen Elementary School
In June, we went to the nearby elementary school to teach the students about oral hygiene and played the board game we designed with them, in order to raise awareness of the serious problem of cavities and arouse their desire of learning biology. For the oral hygiene part, we prepared some courses, including the diagram of teeth, what cause cavities, what we can do to prevent our teeth from cavities, the correct way to brush the teeth, how to choose the teeth brush, and so on. Additionally, we let them estimate their dental plaque to check if they clean their teeth properly. After we finished the course, we played the board game with them. Since they are just little kids, we simplify the game. Although it might still be a little bit difficult for them, they were all trying their best to learn it. With the simple test of dental plaque and the board game, which are pretty interesting for these little kids, they all learned and played happily.
Through this course, we try to have them know the simple knowledge of oral hygiene and biology. We were truly lucky to meet these adorable and cheerful kids!
STEAM FAIR
Every year, the biotechnology center of our school, or BioLab for short, will hold a series of scientific activities which are called STEAM FAIR. The STEAM FAIR activities including lectures given by domestic famous scientists, and practical biotech workshop with some simple experiments.
Last year, we asked BioLab to let us undertake the workshop, then we started to design the activities we wanted to held, including the courses and worksheets. The workshop was divided into three days(parts). For the first day, we have the experiment of electrophoresis. We taught participants the principle of the experiment as we conducted the experiment step by step, so that they could understand it better. For the second part of the activity, we taught them what constitute DNA and how it works. With the simple game we designed for beginners, they got to understand the mystery of life better. As for the third part, we have the experiment of plasmid DNA extraction. Just like day1, we patiently describe the principle of each step, and after they finished doing the experiment, we asked them to try to complete the worksheets by themselves, so that they could absorb the experiment better.
The purpose and the main idea of the workshop is to afford the students who are interested in biotechnology a chance to understand the field more. In addition, we could also recruit iGEM team members for 2021. Fortunately, the activities are big successes, both our members and the participants learn a lot from STEAM FAIR!
