Public Engagement

Lecture

Through our public lecture, we want to introduce the PD community to the public and emphasize the importance of preventing PD, the serious nerve disease. We provided email, WeChat official account, and bilibili (the most popular video platform in China) account for helping people get the latest news of our project and the lecture, as well as contacting us. On August 23rd, we held our lecture in the teenage center, the place that most teenagers and parents go. There were plenty of people sitting and listening to our lecture, and after the lecture, there are several people coming to discuss with us about the PD community’s current situation. They present great interest towards our project, as well.

An audience that carefully is taking pictures of our lecture’s PowerPoint

A kid sticking the sticks of our p roject

We dispatched another questionnaire about the feedback of our lecture.

For Figure 9, we provided our contact for the audiences and welcomed them for helping the PD community by contacting with us.

During the lecture, there were many people asking us whether we had ways to record the lecture so that they could see the full version. Thus, we uploaded the recorded video on the bilibili.

Here is our link: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV19T4y1L7Vt

Public Engagement

Music

All these two things are designed for general people, but we know that it is also necessary to provide help, care, and support for those people that are really in trouble, that is, the PD community, including patients themselves and their families. Therefore, we decide to select this unique and impressive method to convey our best wishes: we want to make a song for the PD community. In this way, we expect that, through lyrics and melody, which are never blocked by distances or ages, we can express our love and care for them and let them feel warm and supported. Also, the song can make people become more familiar with the PD community, which can help the community in a long-lasting way: they will no longer be unnoticed.

However, no one among us understands how to produce songs, and it would diverge from our initial intention to only settle for a regular, even poorly-composed song. We would not like our song to be superficial, rashly composed for winning the competition--we prefer to delicately arrange it, to present our sincere support for the Parkinson’s Community. We thus decide to write the lyric by ourselves to express our genuine wish for the community, and for other steps like mixing and recording, we would collaborate with professionals to produce a complete and exquisite song.

The theme of the song, after several discussions, is aimed to depict the sorrow and happiness of the particular community. We do not want our song to appear condescending or patronizing; thus our lyric writer, Yuqiao Zhu, related to her personal experience (her grandfather suffers from Parkinson’s Disease), and composed the poignant yet hopeful lyric. The lyrics were finished during the summer vacation. All relevant steps were completed in early September and the song was uploaded to NetEase cloud music at the end of September 2020. After that, relevant promotion articles were written and published on the team’s official account on WeChat, the most widely used social media in China. Both the article and song received unanimous praise and high attention, and they both successfully achieved the objectives of increasing public awareness of the PD community.

The most unexpected predicament we encountered in the project was the budget problem. Launching a song to the market costs nearly $1500, which is definitely unaffordable for high school teams like us. Fortunately, through the continuous efforts of the team members and the help of many kind people in the production process, we completed the entire song with only $600. We have met a team of professional musicians who charged a minimum amount of money to compose for us; some enthusiastic students also help us to mix, record, and sing the song for us free of charge. It is impossible for us to complete the song without them. Here we would like to express our sincere gratitude to those who have helped our team during the production process: Aaron Zhang, Trish Zhang, Leo Zheng, and Iker Lin.

Lyrics

Youth perishes like daylight, fading into the endless, endless sea
I see you, father, behind the dimming dazed dye, staring with painful eyes
You stare at a solemn street, your street, that was once immersed with glory
but now only silence lies

“No past can ever be retrieved”,
you murmured, painfully, in dreams
with your trembling hand, you depicted，
--with sorrow，with awe--the winter and the fading beams

Love shall not perish, I told my father, love would never perish
and the never-returning past we would cherish
his muscle helplessly trembling, his eyes helplessly gazing
and my hand is he helplessly holding

So, father, I will take your trembling hand, your trembling yet still warm hand
we would sail across the sand, across the damp, across the land where the giants stand
to the world that forever expands
to the neverland
Youth perishes like daylight, fading into the endless, endless sea
I see you, father, behind the dimming dazed dye, staring with painful eyes
You stare at a solemn street, your street, that was once immersed with glory
but now only silence lies

“No past can ever be retrieved”,
you murmured, painfully, in dreams
with your trembling hand, you depicted
--with sorrow, with awe--the winter and the fading beams

Love shall not perish, I told my father, love would never perish
and the never-returning past we would cherish
his muscle helplessly trembling, his eyes helplessly gazing
and my hand is he helplessly holding

So, father, I will take your trembling hand, your trembling yet still warm hand
we would sail across the sand, across the damp, across the land where the giants stand
to the world that forever expands
to the neverland

Public Engagement

Leaflet

After conducting those online activities, we realized that, although those activities have greatly rendered the PD community more widely known, the PD patients themselves, being mostly elder people, may still feel unnoticed and confused. So we decided to produce a great number of leaflets and put them in places where most the elderly go, that is, the Community Healthcare Center. We call our leaflet “SKIP PD” Handbook, because we hope that no one will ever suffer from the painful disease, with proper precaution taught. On the PD Handbook, we listed several important facts about PD:

1) what is PD;

2) what causes PD;

3) symptoms of PD;

4) how to prevent PD;

5) current treatments;

6) contemporary situation of PD community;

7) our project.

To make people who read our leaflet understand our points immediately, we did not elaborate much on biological facts; for those wanting to learn more, we provided the QR code for our WeChat official account, on which we offered several illustrative articles about our project.

To spread our PD handbook, we did not leaflet passers-by on the street. Instead, we put the leaflets at the Community Healthcare Center. This method may be conceived as passive, but it is also good for long-term spreading – we would keep our corporation with the Community Healthcare Center, so that our PD handbook will be left on the shelf for a long time. The handbook cannot only drive people to reflect upon themselves and take necessary precautions, but also can it help to promote the PD community. We would provide long-term supply as well, in case all the handbooks are carried away. This method would definitely have long-term influences--and our handbooks are now ready to make some influences!

Public Engagement

Official Account-WeChat

Our team spread the related information of our project on different platforms. Immediately after our team was established, our team registered the team's official email and WeChat official account. Our WeChat official account chronologically and recorded most of our public activities in time, including the lecture to introduce Parkinson's disease, the questionnaire to figure out how well the public knows about Parkinson's disease, and the song that lets people pay more attention to Parkinson patients. We tried to write our tweets as varied and vivid as possible to make it acceptable to people of all ages. For example, in a tweet, we introduce the Toehold Switch in a completely hand-drawn form. Each biological component was represented in the form of a cartoon character. It successfully won an increased amount of retweets. The tweet was retweeted 5,500 times in 10 minutes, and the number is still growing.

Official Account-Bilibili

We also uploaded our lecture video to bilibili to let people further understand the symptoms, mechanism, and preventive measures of Parkinson's disease. On bilibili, the most popular video platform in China, we uploaded our daily interesting vlogs and lecture video, in order to have people know more about how we students who study biology do daily.

Official Account-Email

Our email address is sms_shenzhenigem@outlook.com. If any team wants to contact us in a private way, another available account is L.Ren.sms@hotmail.com.

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Team:SMS Shenzhen/Public engagement

Public Engagement

Public Engagement

Lyrics

Public Engagement

Public Engagement