Team:WHU-China/Education
To raise public awareness of nosocomial infection, engineered probiotic and synthetic biology as well, we wrote popular science articles and comics and then released them on some of the most popular social media platforms with almost weekly updates. The topics of our articles are as follows:
In addition, in order to meet the requirement of different user groups, the writing styles we applied to vary from platform to platform.
Weibo refers to a social media platform which allows users to update real-time information in the form of text, images, video and other multimedia. With nearly half a billion monthly active users, it’s extremely easy for Weibo to realize information sharing and instant messaging communication interaction. Via Weibo, we published a brief introduction of our project and relevant popular science articles and comics, with deep questions explored in simple terms, each piece content-rich without being murky, which have got thousands of visits and readings.
Based on Wechat, the public account allows comprehensive communication and interaction of articles, pictures, videos between account operators and its followers. Compared to Weibo, the intended audience are more specific. For instance as for our project, it’s merely other competitors of iGem and undergraduates who could get real-time update from our account, for which we wrote our articles in a more professional way.
Importantly, our WeChat account serves as a significant platform for communications with the public and other 2020 iGEM teams. For instance, we provided the QR codes linked with our questionnaires in relevant articles and released the invitation of Anti-Biofilm Community for more beneficial collaborations.
Meanwhile, in the interests of outreach expansion, we contacted some other public accounts of WHU students’ organizations to help promotion.
Bilibili is a highly concentrated cultural community and video platform for young Generations in China, which has built an ecosystem of continuous high-quality works among users, creators and contents. By the second quarter of 2020, the average monthly active users of Bilibili reached 172 million, while the monthly active users on mobile terminal reached 153 million, with users between 18 and 35 years old accounting for 78%.
Therefore we published our popular science articles and comics mainly targeting younger generations, aiming to broaden horizon and raise their awareness of nosocomial infection, engineered probiotic and synthetic biology.
Our team, WHU-China, has been participating in iGEM for 10 years, and every year our team members from multidisciplinary backgrounds were deeply touched by the innovative ideas of iGEM. Over the past decade, synthetic biology has facilitated the great turn of research method in biological fields, from ‘observe life to understand’ to ‘build life to understand’. To promote the promising ideas of iGEM and synthetic biology for broader interactions, we held a public lecture for audiences interested in these topics, mostly freshmen of College of Life Sciences.
The 18-year history of iGEM was briefly summarized, and we recapitulated the ideas of iGEM as, to accomplish a multidisciplinary competition involved with various fields by collaborations with global peers. Great works done by teams in previous iGEM seasons were introduced with diverse highlights to illustrate above-mentioned merits of iGEM. Subsequently, we described several vivid examples of the industrialization of synthetic biology ideas, e.g. the leading synthetic biology enterprise Amyris, the promising Asian start-up Bluepha, and the recent notable synthetic biology event in Hubei Province, semi-biosynthesis of Vitamin E. Ultimately, we concluded the ten-year journey of WHU-China in iGEM, as well as our project this year, ‘The Negotiator’.
We arranged Q&A section right after the lecture, and received positive feedbacks from passionate audiences. In addition, the QR codes for our questionaires were exhibited during the Q&A section, using guiding questions to improve the quality of real-time communications with our audiences. Overall, we deem that the purposes of inclusivity and education were well fulfilled in this meaningful activity, successfully spreading the ideas of iGEM and synthetic biology among our communities.
According to the analysis of questionaire we distributed to the public, we found it of vital significance to improve public cognitive level of nosocomial infection, engineered probiotic and synthetic biology as well. Under the new media pattern in the 21st century, communicating and popularizing science in the form of comics has become a popular and necessary method. Therefore we had a collaboration with an illustrator and artist, creating a short scroll which made a brief and readily understandable introduction of pathogenicity of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in pulmonary nosocomial infection and prophylactic measures.
Claire
Our team, WHU-China, is the co-founder of Anti-Biofilm Community (ABC), and was appointed as the administrator of ABC after the proposer SZU-China changed their project. With new members (DUT_China, Tsinghua, SUSTech_Shenzhen, HK_HCY) joining the partnership, we held the 2nd and 3rd Workshop of Anti-Biofilm Community to seek for potential collaborations in diverse directions. Among our collaboration attempts, we’re proud to present ‘A Handbook of Anti-Biofilm Community’ as interesting education materials.
In this brochure, we 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.
