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Courses on Synthetic Biology
Many high school and college students have developed a great interest in biology. However, since synthetic biology is a relatively new branch in the field, only a small number of biology enthusiasts know about it.
In order to introduce the amazing principles and potential applications of synthetic biology, we joined a co-education project with teams from other four schools, which were THU, BNU, CAU, and FAFU. In August, we delivered five courses on a famous short video platform. The target audience was high school students and college students across the country, who might be attracted by our advertisement on social media, or by the recommendation from their teachers. These courses introduced the basics of synthetic biology and its prospects in different fields, with each team focusing on one field.
According to the nature of our iGEM project, our team gave a course about how synthetic biology is connected to information technology and art. We started from the potential of DNA in information storage, and led them down a long gallery of DNA-stored art works, from the image Microvenus to two songs, Smoke on the Water and Tutu. At the end of the lecture we presented the new idea we had been carrying out, which included creating music and drawings out of natural and mutated DNA sequences
After the course, we distributed a questionnaire among our audience. From the 91 answer sheets we received, it could be seen that about 81% of the audience were high school students, while almost all the rest of them were in college. About 25% of our listeners were familiar with the term "synthetic biology" thanks to their experience as iGEM competitors or their schoolmates. Among those who were rather new to synthetic biology, 93% first heard it from our advertisement, instead of books, magazines, or other internet pages. Although their background knowledge was differentiated, many of the audience found the thoughts of synthetic biology interesting and inspiring.