In the part of science communication, we mainly carried out three meaningful interaction activities. We designed an educational event for undergraduate students who are interested in biology, aiming to spread the concept of synthetic biology and make more students interested in synthetic biology and our project. And we produced and distributed science brochures on campus. Besides, we uploaded 2 small videos on the Bilibili website to introduce our project to the public.
Team:SUSTech Shenzhen/Education
Education
Overview
Educational Event for Undergraduate Students
We held an educational event about synthetic biology for undergraduate students in SUSTech and also invited professors from the Department of Biology. The event contained a pre-event questionnaire, a small introduction lecture, panel discussions, and after-event feedback. We hope that more and more people can be interested in synthetic biology, and try to figure out the application of synthetic biology in production and other areas.
For a better setting of this event, we made a questionnaire to investigate the understanding of synthetic biology in the population.
It can be known from the preliminary survey that 78.18% of people have only heard of synthetic biology but did not understand it. And only less than a quarter of people believe that they will not be exposed to work-related to synthetic biology in the future. Therefore, we have a great need to let more people understand what synthetic biology is.
The statistics in the two tables above are multiple-choice questions. We can see from the data that more than half of the people think that the intersection of mathematics, physics, and environmental sciences, and synthetic biology is not related. But in fact, these disciplines are extremely closely related to synthetic biology. And talents with multidisciplinary knowledge can shine in the field of synthetic biology. At the same time, it can be seen from the last table that synthetic biology has applications in many fields. Therefore, it is extremely meaningful to popularize the knowledge of synthetic biology.
In the small lecture part, our team leader firstly gave a brief introduction about synthetic biology and our project, and then explained the molecular mechanism behind the CRISPR system, the modern gene-editing technology. Meanwhile, we also invited Mr. Kai WANG from BGI Genomics Co. Ltd to address a lecture about the history of genes and genomics. After that, we organized a group discussion about the modern development of synthetic biology as well as its application, each group had several students and one professor.
Our team leader made a presentation introducing synthetic biology and our project
Discuss with Mr. Kai WANG to get some feedback about the educational event
After the event, we collected some feedback. All participants think that a lot has been gained from the event. The educational event gave many students a preliminary understanding of synthetic biology. And we hope that more people can be interested in synthetic biology and be able to put forward some new ideas and contribute to some new applications.
Science Brochures Distribution
We joined in Anti-Biofilm Community (ABC), a cloud community where iGEMers can share their idea about biofilm. And we produced science brochures together with other five iGEM teams of ABC, including WHU_China, HK_HCY, Tsinghua, MU_Macau, and DUT_China.
We distribute science brochures on campus, hoping that more students can learn about our project and become interested in it. At the same time, we also put our science brochures on the magazine rack. We hope people passing by can pick it up, open it, and be attracted by it.
Due to the influence of our brochure, some other iGEM teams were also attracted. For example, SCUT_China, they conducted further exchanges with some iGEM teams of ABC and produced their own brochure.
Scientific Video Popularization
We uploaded 2 small videos about our project this year on the Bilibili website. One is a simple project overview, and the other is a simple scientific explanation about the CRISPR system. You can simply click the pictures on the right to get access to the websites accordingly.
We uploaded videos to make synthetic biology accessible to a wider range of people. Therefore, both of the two videos use easy-to-understand language and are accompanied by concise animations. We hope that through short videos, more people interested in synthetic biology and the direction of our project this year can learn more about this knowledge