Team:Worldshaper-Nanjing/Education
Introduction
Hangzhou science exhibition
Self-media platform
During previous time, our team members have presented the iGEM competition, synthetic biology as well as our project mainly to the public and our schoolmates via various ways. Successfully, we lit up most of their curiosity and passion in biology and our focus—reusing the waste to produce useful resources. We use diverse ways, as AI presentation and models relating to synthetic biology to illustrate our concepts vividly. When in school, classmates came to ask about the competition the most, as the tasks we need to complete within iGEM and how to participate it. When in exhibitions, the public will mainly be curious about the novel subject—synthetic biology, along with discussing our dreams that promoted us to dedicate our spare time in this subject. With these memorable communication, our understanding about this subject as well as our topic have been sublimated. We changed parts of our focus accordingly. While without any solid definition about synthetic biology, our idea have also changed significantly. After sharing all our gains, we were glad to see many friends and relatives of us become interested in it. We hope that our small efforts can lit up many teenagers’ passion for biology and science, which will eventually make up a great picture in this field!
In order to introduce our project and promote popular science to the public, our team took part in the 2020 Hangzhou science exhibition, cooperating with two other iGEM teams from Hangzhou and Shanghai (Worldshaper-Shanghai and ASTWS-China). Our team members organized this activity with high efficiency. The preparation work includes our brochure, poster, promotion video and speech, which we divided up before finishing them in just 4 days. These materials contain the information of our team, project and the function of synthetic biology. Also, to attract young visitors’ attention, we bought a couple sets of DNA puzzles, a science picture book and sweets as reward. As newcomers of the exhibition, we have no idea how to attract visitors' attention at first. Though our sweets appealed to children, the DNA puzzles did not attract a large number of them as we had expected. By contrast, another team from Hangzhou did well with the use of dart games. Gradually, we sought out a method conductive to a lasting attraction as well as sufficient game reward supply—we were responsible for offering sweets and taking the opportunity to introduce our project to parents while their children were playing at Hangzhou team’s stall. The cooperation mode was effective. Also, interestingly enough, we met a professor from Tsinghua University who had the same try as us but failed because of insufficient fund. He encouraged us while offering suggestions, which mean a lot to us.
During the exhibition, our team members felt great support from the public and experts alike. Also, we hope our attempt at promoting science to children could arouse their curiosity. The trip to Hangzhou worth the efforts.
We are honoured to be interviewed by Today Science & Technology magazine. We introduced the main purpose and basic principles of our experiment in the magazine, by which we hope will promote the project among a wider range.
Moreover, in order to share our experience and knowledge to the general public, we publicized our project and research in social media platforms including Wechat, Weibo, facebook, Jianshu, Instagram, ect.
We generally share some specialized knowledge in Biology, including the equipment and apparatus we use in the laboratory, the experimental procedures we are doing and detailed information on synthetic biology. There are also more specific descriptions of our project and iGEM, the competition itself. These articles written by ourselves play a crucial role in arousing the public’s aware of the bright future of using biological technology to solve problems, as well as gaining more public attention on our project. Besides, we update our daily communication and activities outside the laboratory. For example, we share pictures of our trip to Hangzhou science exhibition and our team building activities to connect each other closer.
After so many months efforts, we have made great achievements on our self-media operation. We reach a total number of over 1000 views and several hundreds likes from all aspects of the society, both in China and all around the world. Their supports make us motivated to let more people understand our project.
