Team:Tsinghua/Education
Education
Online Co-education Public Course：
“Synthetic Biology : From the Beginning”
Due to the COVID-19 epidemic and the popularity of online course, as an alternative to offline teaching, together with Peking, BNU-China, CAU_China and FAFU-CHINA, we launched the popular science course "Synthetic Biology :From the Beginning" for the public.
Our six-day course covers the application of synthetic biology in the environment, industry, energy, diagnosis, informatics, arts and other fields, as well as the project profile of each team. It is open to the whole society and has been promoted in more than 20 junior and senior high schools across Beijing and other regions of China. Our online course is also well supported and recognized by the Beijing Municipal Department of Education And Department of Education in Xicheng District, Shunyi District, Shijingshan District, Fengtai District and Daxing District, as well as high school teachers in eight districts of Beijing city.
Our courses are streamed live on the online platform-Bilibili, and recorded on Bilibili and WeChat public account registered by Tsinghua. During the live broadcast of the course, the average watch of the online course was over 3,500 , and the total number of live broadcast exceeded 20,000. We arranged many interactive parts with our audience in the online courses, including bullet screen questions and open discussions. After each class, we also distributed feedback questionnaires. In order to encourage more people to participate in the course and learn about synthetic biology, we held a special lottery for the course participants after the course, and gave out gifts including DNA rings and postcards.
The feedback questionnaire is released after the course and collected through the questionnaire App: Wenjuan Xing, and audience can fill in the feedback questionnaire by scanning the QR code in the livestream. A total of 131 effective feedback questionnaires were collected, among which 67% were junior and senior high school students, 27% were college students and above (including graduate students and PhD students), and 6% were teachers. Most audience said they had few knowledge about synthetic biology before, but have a deeper understanding of synthetic biology and iGEM after our course. According to the survey on interest satisfaction and gained satisfaction, the average score of gained satisfaction is 3.96 out of 5, with 65% of the respondents saying that they have gained a lot. The average score of interest satisfaction was 3.97 out of 5, with 74 percent of respondents reporting a significant increase in interest in synthetic biology and iGEM competitions.
As the leading team, Tsinghua came up with the course proposal, contacted each team and organized the preparation of the course. Before the beginning of the course, we organized several weekly meeting to discuss and arrange our preparation content of the course. During the meeting, we also discussed our team project and received feedback from other teams. After each section of the course, we loaded all the recorded videos and summary to our public account. We also shared the course feedback and summary with each team. Tsinghua held two of the six-day online course,including the first and the last day. Three of our teammembers: Yang Gao, Ao Wang and Yijun Niu give three online lectures, and the highest watch of our lecture surged over 8,000.
Tsinghua is also responsible for the art design of the online course. We made the publicity poster and PPT template for the course and shared them with other teams. During the design process of the poster, other teams also gave suggestions for our art design. In addition, we are also responsible for the course related gifts. Our team members in charge of art design drew postcards, printed and distributed them to our audience, and selected special gifts on the Internet to send to the lucky audience, including DNA rings, caffeine badges and other exquisite gifts.
Handbook of anti-biofilm
Organized by WHU_China, the Anti-Biofilm Community designed a popular science handbook for introducing our project and publicize the scientific knowledge on biofilm.
The brochure was divided the content into two parts. In part I, the Chinese/English introduction of each ABC member’s project this year is displayed, in order to educate the public with the ideas of synthetic biology. In part II, we exhibited a collection of distinctive and interesting materials written in Chinese/English, including our science comic ‘Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia’, UM_Macau’s popular science series articles, DUT_China’s cartoon introduction, and Tsinghua’s science comic ‘kill the biofilm’, for addressing biofilm-related challenges in different context with understandable descriptions.
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