Team:PuiChing Macau/Education
Talk at secondary school
We have delivered some talks at school for secondary students to promote iGEM, synthetic biology and our project. The talks were about 40 minutes each, we had presentation and interaction sessions with questions about what we had covered. The students were very responsive and most of our questions were answered correctly.
In addition, as we were discussing the board applications of synthetic biology in solving the world regional problems, there was student raising idea e.g. Using food waste to feed bacteria growth to save money. This let us to consider the potential of recycling material from waste then further engineer them into proper flame retardant. This idea later on allow us to discover the potential of caesin protein as flame retardant from literature review and use in our project.
Booth game
We produced a booth game for primary pupils and parents to promote the concept of gene, DNA, RNA etc. The pupils, parents and even teachers had fun from our booth game. Our team members also had some good time when they designed the game, made the booth and prepared the questions, as well as ‘trial run” of the game. Other than delivering happiness and knowledge to the players, the preparation of the booth game was also a good team-building activity for our team.
Newspaper articles
During the lockdown of school and wet lab at the university, we did some on-line research on our project. Our team member thought other than reading, we might do some writing as well. So our team leader wrote a couple of short articles for the newspaper about knowledge of personal hygiene, some concepts about COVID-19 and viruses. Unexpectedly, we also got some “funding” for our project from the newsagent for our articles.
Promotion video
We have produced a promotion video for iGEM, synthetic biology and principle of our project. We would like to let more people know more about these topics, thus we also send the video to the Education and Youth Affairs Bureau, which gave us great support for our iGEM project last year, for distribution to local schools.