Team:SYSU-CHINA/Education

3. Science education for high school students

4. Attended in Southern China Regional Meeting

Overview

From our previous experience, we realize that society, especially the older generation, often does not understand synthetic biology and base editing. Due to the lack of relevant knowledge, they are often affected by some false information, with fear and rejection following. In order to prevent this negative cycle from recurring, we decided to join the team of Shanghai Jiaotong University to conduct a popular science education related to our projects to educate the young generation from the beginning. We hope that by changing their minds and encouraging them to start thinking outside of their inherent thinking, they can get rid of this negative cycle and promote positive changes in the future. We believe that through different platforms and ways of cooperation, we can show the importance of science and our hopes and motivations to a wider audience. Therefore, we have adopted three different forms for popularizing science education.

1. SYSU-CHINA WeChat official account

As a daily tool used by the young generation, WeChat has an insurmountable advantage in publicity. Therefore, we use the team's official account to publicize by publishing articles. The articles mainly introduce the concept, development history and content of synthetic biology and iGEM competition to the young generation and people who don't pick up life science as their major in concise and vivid language. The purpose of communicating with readers is achieved by replying in the comment area and WeChat official account backstage.

Figure 1. The homepage of our official account and Advertise our iGEM compretition

Figure 2. Waiting for more people to join us and The brief introduction of our 2020 iGEM project SEAi

2. SYSU-CHINA account at bilibili

Bilibili, as a video website for Chinese young people to gather and communicate, is an excellent community for popularizing science. Therefore, we applied for an account and upload videos, which are more intuitive and clearer than text, to promote our project and knowledge related to biology. With the active barrage culture at bilibili, we can easily interact and communicate with the audience through the barrage and comments. Welcome to visit our homepage at: https://space.bilibili.com/382912874?spm_id_from=333.788.b_765f7570696e666f.1

Figure 3. The homepage of our blibli

Figure 4. Our video for publicity

3. Science education for high school students

We cooperated with the team SJTU-BioX-Shanghai from Shanghai Jiaotong University to carry out popular science education with the theme of directed evolution. We jointly wrote plans and prepared popular science materials for Guangdong Experimental High School and High School Affiliated to Fudan University students and their iGEM team. Due to the epidemic, this popular science education was carried out in the form of online conferences and was divided into two parts. One for Guangdong Experimental High School and the other for High School Affiliated to Fudan University. During the popular science education, the two teams cooperated to complete the display session, preaching the knowledge of directed evolution and their iGEM projects this year respectively. And then we have a vocal discussion with high school students to answer questions raised by students. Due to the impact of COVID-19, it's a great pity that the education was not allowed to hold face to face in Shanghai, yet we still planned to do this later after this is permitted.

Figure 5. The online education

4.Attended in Southern China Regional Meeting

We participated in the 4th Southern China Regional Meeting held by SZU-China this June. In all, about 25 Chinese teams took part in the meeting. Due to the impact of the epidemic, this year's meeting could not be held offline, only online presentation and communication were permitted. During the meeting, we not only made a video showing others about our own project, but also listened to the lectures from guests invited by the conference host. We learned form this meeting how to organize our work online using various kinds of software, which was significant because COVID-19 stopped us from returning to campus. Also, we watched videos from other iGEM teams, which gave us new inspiration for our own project.

Figure 6. The first step of Southern China Regional Meeting

5.Took Part in CCiC

On August 28 to 31, we participated in the 7th CCiC (Conference of China iGEMer Community) online. Which is a regional meeting co-sponsored by iGEMer in China, and is designed to provide a wide platform for the exchanges of different iGEM teams. It's like a preview of Giant Jamboree in China, which allows teams to show their projects and posters, learning from each other and giving comments and suggestions.

During CCiC, we made our own poster and gave our presentation, these two forms make our project easier to understand for others, just like what we will do in the Novermber's Giant Jamboree. Additionally, we also learned which team had the similar content as ours in CCiC, which allow us to have a better understanding of our project as well as think about more possibility of own aim.

Figure 7. Our Poster made for CCiC

Figure 8. Our presentation video made for CCiC