Education

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Online Student Carnival

Online Educated With Beijing Bayi School Affiliated Yuquan Middle School

Science Communication

Synthetic Biology Festival

Online Student Carnival of Tsinghua University High School

Because COVID-19 spread in most provinces of China, Tsinghua University High School held an online student carnival which intended to construct a platform for students to display their interests.In the middle of April, our project already focused on the usage of tardigrades. To expand the recognition of synthesis biology, iGEM competition and tardigrade in our community, QHFZ-China 2020 took part in this activity as well.
On May 23rd, we introduced the previous project of our team in 2019, which led the audience to build on the understanding of engineering bacteria, focusing on the existing issues in society, inspired them to think about how we can solve the existing issue by using biological actions. After that, our team members shared their experience in iGEM 2020 and passed on some concepts of iGEM. At last, we used the video to introduce tardigrade to the public, which enriched their knowledge about the micro-organism.

Online Educated With Beijing Bayi School Affiliated Yuquan Middle School

To further share our learnings, we contacted Beijing Bayi School Affiliated Yuquan Middle School. On August 19th, we made a real-time online lesson for the students of Grade 8. We introduced them to DNA fingerprinting, showed them the process of agarose gel electrophoresis, and also introduced them to the current usages of synthesis biology. After coming back to school, we recorded a video about the process of lyophilization and our project this year. The content included lyophilization, tardigrade and transformation. We sent the video to Beijing Bayi School Affiliated Yuquan Middle School. Their students watched the video and their teachers also gave us extremely positive feedbacks and comments from students.

We would use a picture to summarize our online lesson, because we think the design has a reference value to others.

We put the video we sent to the school below.

Science Communication

Additionally, we went to the Class 5, Grade 10 in Tsinghua University High School. We discussed with students about how the biological applications are used in our daily life, introduced some popular technology that are related to synthesis biology , and led them to think about how synthesis biology is used in our lives. We showed them some interesting iGEM projects, which we thought could inspire their interest in biology. At the end, we introduced our project this year, which helped them learn new information on lyophilization, showed them how the TDPs worked during the experiment and also shared our experiences with them.

As for public engagement, we operated our own official accounts. We updated abbreviation passages regularly, sent weekly dairy to record the course of our team. In this way we achieved the purpose of publicize biology in daily life.

Synthetic Biology Festival

During our second monthly online meet up in September, we got to understand that KEYSTONE was struggling because they want to expand the scope of their public education event: The Keystone Synthetic Biology Festival. However, they could not find a way to expand the scale of their festival during this limited time. Luckily, we also realized that although our project is mostly developed, we have not introduced it to people who are not professionals in the field of synthetic biology. Therefore, since we have found a shared goal, our team decided to collaborate with Keystone and arrange a new exhibition at our school to share knowledge with students as well as visitors at our school. For the event, we invited KEYSTONE, BUCT-China, RDFZ-China, BHSF, BJ101HS, as well as UCAS-China to participate. The event lasted for 3 hours and attracted a crowd of two hundred people over its timespan. During the event, students and visitors asked questions, proposed hypotheses, and recorded interesting facts about each of our projects. As we received the comments from our visitors, one visitor wrote that his biggest memory of this event is how he learned that "The basis of any experimental procedures is a question, so as students and young scientists, we need to be observant." Another student wrote that "Through this event, I learned that the field of synthetic biology possess limitless potential, no matter in the laboratories or in real life." We cannot agree more with their inspiring comments and insights, and we are more tha happy that they learned so much from our event. Through this event, we achieved our goal to publicize our project and helped an iGEM team that required help at the same time.