Team:RDFZ-China/Education
Education
Currently, mainstream drugs for treating depression have serious side effects. In addition, taking the medicine itself also has big problems. Due to the lack of knowledge about medication rules and concerns about external perceptions, the patient's current medication status is not optimistic.
So we thought of diet therapy, a more popular method. This project uses tea as a medium to build an operating system that releases 5-HTP, so as to better alleviate the problem of low levels of serotonin in patients with depression and bipolar disorder and alleviate their symptoms. We drew inspiration from the universal beverage "tea" of the project itself, and believed that medical treatment and health care could be more universal and more down to earth.
In traditional Chinese culture, tea has long been given the meaning of self-cultivation. Similarly, diet therapy is more gentle and comfortable than taking medicine, and food does not have the side effects like medicine or pose a health threat, so it is easier to be accepted by the public. We have carried out a series of activities around tea and depression, the purpose is to attract more people to pay attention to our project and synthetic biology.Synthetic biologists engineer living cells to enable them to secrete useful molecules. They design genetic circuits where biological parts within a cell perform logical functions. In practice, genetic circuits can be illustrated by Synthetic Biology Open Language, a series of deliberately designed yet simple glyphs. They illustrate the logics of genetic circuits precisely and conveniently, which was very important when we were having discussions over the design of our project. Moreover, we find these glyphs way more interesting and easy-to-accept than any other element related to synthetic biology, because little expertise is required to understand the logic of a genetic circuit. Thus, we believe they are an ideal medium for synthetic biology education.
Genetic Circuit Jigsaw Puzzle
Synthetic biology is a discipline with great potential. It has been playing an increasingly important role in our daily lives. However, this discipline lacks people's attention, which could restrict its development. Thus, we want to stimulate people’s passion for synthetic biology and enable them to learn some basic ideas. Tomake synthetic accessible for more people, we designed a jigsaw puzzle game that can explain some of the key ideas of synthetic biology as well as our project. Synthetic biologists engineer living cells to enable them to secrete useful molecules. They design genetic circuits where biological parts within a cell perform logical functions. In practice, genetic circuits can be illustrated by Synthetic Biology Open Language, a series of deliberately designed yet simple glyphs. They illustrate the logics of genetic circuits precisely and conveniently, which was very important when we were having discussions over the design of our project. Moreover, we find these glyphs way more interesting and easy-to-accept than any other element related to synthetic biology, because little expertise is required to understand the logic of a genetic circuit. Thus, we believe they are an ideal medium for synthetic biology education.
We hope that users can learn how genetic circuits are designed and how their components work cooperatively. Inspired by electric circuit toys, we designed the Genetic Circuit Jigsaw Puzzle. Each piece of the puzzle represents a part of a certain circuit. When the players are operating, we hope that they could solve the puzzles while learning the logic of the genetic circuits.
Currently, two genetic circuits are included in our product. The first one is the repressilator, which is a regulatory system with negative feedback loops. The second one is the circuit used in our project, TEA-HEE. These two circuits are relatively simple, so we believe they are suitable for our puzzle.
These are our prototypes. We consulted teachers as well as many students and received some advice.
We thoroughly considered their advice and started to think about how we could improve our product. We redesigned the product and made several improvements according to the feedback.
1. In our prototype, we kept those glyphs in our puzzles. However, we realized that they were not enough to attract users. Thus, we decorated the puzzles, using different colors to show different parts and adding everyday elements to make them easier to understand.
2. In our prototype, we included a brief guide about the logics of the circuits. However, it is not sufficient to enable the users to fully understand how things work. Thus, we designed a more detailed guide, which teaches the users to solve the puzzle step by step according to the circuit’s logic.
Here is our final product.
We invited more people to experience the puzzle. This time, we received feedback that encouraged us to think and reflect thoroughly.
In all, we need to make this product acceptable to a wider range of users. Fortunately, our project is still in its first phase. Next year, we might consider improving this product according to the feedback we received. We believe our product has great potential to contribute to the education of synthetic biology, and we will never stop exploring ways of making synthetic biology accessible for more and more people. Our final product is shown at the end of this page.
Fundamentals of Healthy Diet
The World Health Organization has made reasonable diet one of the four cornerstones of health. In addition, more and more scientific research results show that most of the diseases that endanger human health are caused by improper diet. This shows that a reasonable diet is an important part of health. However, most people only pay attention to food taste and convenience in their daily diet, but they are not comprehensive in their nutrition, hygiene and health considerations. For example, According to Dietary Guidelines, peoples typical eating pattern needs to be changed. In the United States, about three-fourths of the population has an eating pattern that is low in vegetables, fruits, dairy, and oils; more than half of the population is meeting or exceeding total grain and total protein foods recommendations, but are not meeting the recommendations for the subgroups within each of these food groups. To have a healthy body, a healthy diet is especially important. Studies have shown that a balanced, scientific and reasonable diet can ensure the normal operation of vital signs, and unreasonable eating habits can damage the health of the body.
In order to encourage people to eat scientifically, we have launched a series of videos about this topic: "Fundamentals of Healthy Diet.". Our videos mainly include a brief introduction to six major categories of nutrients, misunderstandings in health products, and food and various diseases. In these videos, we explained every concept thoroughly with clear annotations. After making the videos, we uploaded it to the BiliBili as well as YouTube and gained more than 2000 playback. After watching the videos, many people said that these series of videos effectively popularized the knowledge about healthy diet and corrected the common eating mistakes that people have in daily life.
BILIBILI:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1wf4y1B7WC/
YouTube:
In the future, we hope our videos can be more interactive. We can add a question and answer session at the end of each video, to solve their problem and to better stimulate the enthusiasm of our audience. Also, according to our data, most of the audiences didn't make it to the end. Thus, we plan to make shorter videos and talk about fewer things in each episode.
To sum up, our education projects show the beauty of synthetic biology as well as general sciences. More importantly, they can enrich your daily life. We worked on our project to help depressed patients, and our education projects should serve the same purpose. We hope that, after experiencing our education projects, the depressed patients will discover that there are still many wonderful things to learn, to explore, and to love. Maybe this world is not perfect, but we hope that the depressed patients can embrace the beauty of life.
Ref:
2. Ruth A. Roth, Nutrition & Diet Therapy 11th Edition, Cengage Learning, 2013