Team:OUC-China/Comics
Overview
The popularization of science is definitely not an easy thing. It should be educational and interesting enough to attract people at the same time, and that’s why we chose comics as means of promoting science. Comics contain information in pictures and dialogues. Compared with sheer articles, they would be more accessible to a wider range of people with different education backgrounds. This year, we produced ten issues of comics in total, consisting of two series, one is about the coronavirus, and the second series aimed at spreading synthetic biology.
Comics About Viruses
In the last winter, the coronavirus epidemic started to break out, everyone felt insecure. Since then, there was a variety of articles that talked about how to prevent ourselves from getting COVID-19 spreading on social media, many of which were faked, and made use of people’s insecurity to catch attention. Especially, people who didn’t receive much science education tend to be confused by them. And that’s definitely not something we would like to see.
Out of a sense of social responsibility, we produced six chapters of virus comics to spread scientific knowledge about COVID-19. The topics of our comics range from how the immunity system works to the theory behind nucleic acid testing. Not only did we simply remind people of keeping wearing masks and paying attention to personal hygiene, but we also tried to convince people of why we should do these with the scientific knowledge in the stories.
When we are designing the contents of our comics, the first priority was to make sure of its effect on the Wechat platform where we published our comics. Unfortunately, many of the pages have different sizes, which makes it difficult to be presented on the wiki. But we did manage to translate chapter 5 enclosed with a tip: Don’t forget your mask and wash your hands frequently!
Click here to read: What would happen to you after you are infected with COVID-19?
Figure 1. The comics about COVID-19 that we published on Wechat platform
E. coli Spaceship
Since 2017, team OUC-China has been producing a comic series called E. coli Spaceship, which describes the ribosomes as the crew on E. coli spaceship. In 2018 and 2019, team OUC-China started to seek international cooperation with iGEM teams for the E. coli Spaceship comic book series. The comic books have been translated into many different languages and were highly praised while spreading.
According to our questionnaire result in Human Practice, we found it still necessary to carry on promoting synthetic biology. Therefore, we produced another four chapters of E. coli Spaceship, including repressilator, riboregulatory, toehold switch, and three-way-junction switch and tried our best to tell the story in an interesting manner.
Figure 2. The cover of our E.coli Spaceship comics
Spreading
We have published all the comics on OUCiGEM WeChat platform, so as to popularize the knowledge of synthetic biology to the general public. Up to date, our comics have been read by thousands of people and achieved the basic purpose of disseminating COVID-19 and synthetic biology knowledge. What’s more, we shared our comics with other iGEM teams to expand the influence.
According to our previous survey to teachers in the less-developed areas, the comic is a favored form of spreading knowledge. So, we took full advantage of our comic series, applying them to our education program. In view of the Internet situation and environmental protection issues, our comics are available in both paper and electronic versions. For areas with difficulties in accessing the Internet, we planned to distribute comics printed on environment-friendly paper. For areas with easy access to the Internet, electronic versions will be distributed.