Education
Public Education and Engagement
Introduction
To provide the society with more information about our project and Synthetic Biology, we organized a variety of events to demonstrate our progress and achievements.
1、 Presentation at Wuhan New Channel School
This publicity campaign is a promotion of lead pollution and its detection, treatment and recycling projects. Three team members from our team outlined the hazards and prevention of lead pollution, iGEM and synthetic biology, along with the general principles of operation of our biological machines.
The location of our event was carried out in five student classrooms in Wuhan New Chanel School. We have launched some small activities so that we can introduce the principles of the genetic pathway to them in an easier way.
In terms of lead pollution, we have carefully explained the uninteresting content such as "Why can lead poisoning easily affect children?" and things that may not be seen on TV.
Later on in our presentation, iGEM became a key introduction object since it was probably new for the students in the class. The introduction, meaning and authority of the iGEM competition are within the scope of this section. This motivated us to plan for more public outreach and crowdfunding activities afterwards, and we are constantly improving our presentation for future events.
While the lecture was going on indoor, some of our team members distributed the team's fliers (with our team information, public number, QR code, fund-raising link, etc.).
Leaflet distribution
Our presentation audience were the first to accept the fliers, and some of them also scanned our WeChat public account and official Weibo.
More importantly, we distributed fliers in crowded locations to make it more efficient. Although the frustration caused by the uninterested passers-by has caused some influence on these newcomers, we were still very grateful to the small group of people who accepted the fliers and even actively asked us questions. Their actions encouraged us to continue working. We believe that the face-to-face understanding of part of our projects is only a small part of the results, but the sense of planning and gaining confidence throughout the process is more important. Consequently, we now have more open-minded ideas for future online publicity (such as WeChat public account and official Weibo, etc.), and can understand the audience's perspective to make the current online promotion more successful.
Public’s Feedback
Most of the students who participated in the speech understood the professional knowledge in our speech and were very interested in it. Some of them also scanned our WeChat public account and official Weibo to learn more about the information.
After the lecture, we came to Zhongnan Street and distributed our fliers to the public near the subway station. Most of them took the flyers, and even a small number of people actively asked us for further information.
2、 Presentation at Wuhan Britain-China School
From the result of our public surveys, we learned the importance of providing public presentations about Synthetic Biology and our project’s real life applications for teenagers. Thus, the three high school teams from Wuhan cooperated and planned a presentation at Wuhan Britain-China School.
Yichen Li and Kexin Huang from XHD-WS-Wuhan A team, George Luo and Florence Zhang from XHD-WS-Wuhan B team, and Yiming Huang and Sijia Wang from Worldshaper-wuhan team are the main organizers for this event.
In our presentation, we first introduced the basic concepts and experiments about Synthetic Biology along with the iGEM Competition. Then, we added more information about each of our team’s project--detection and treatment of arsenic from Worldshaper-Wuhan team, early diagnosis of gastric cancer from XHD-A team, and lastly, detection and treatment of lead from our team.
Even though the number of participants was not as desired, but we believe that activities like this can still benefit students by helping a small portion of them to understand iGEM and Synthetic Biology. We wanted them to know that Synthetic Biology is not a subject that only exists in the laboratory and seems very distant from us, instead, it is closely related to our society and can be used to solve many difficulties in our lives. Just like what we are doing, even though we are only high school students, we can still learn and use knowledge from Synthetic Biology and apply them to make our lives better. Most importantly, our society provides us with chances such as iGEM for us to do so. Overall, no matter how many participants came to this public education, we still think that this activity was a success.
3、 Public Engagement at Hangzhou Science and Technology Museum.
Collaborative public engagement activities with Worldshanper-Shanghai team played a vital role in the design of our team's external activities. The event was held in Hangzhou Low Carbon Science and Technology Museum. A total of 7 teams from all over the country gathered here, each with a different theme. We cooperated together to design the iGEM public event of Hangzhou Low Carbon Science and Technology Museum. Our team partnered up with Worldshanper-Shanghai Team and completed most of our activities with them. We first did some activities with the children which include extracting DNA from the human body through saliva. We use materials such as detergents, hand sanitizers and clenbuterol to complete this activity. Then, we gave the adults a presentation about the iGEM competition and the basic contents of our team’s project. After the presentation, we distributed the questionnaires we created and gathered some feedback from all the participants.
4、 WeChat Official Account:
WeChat is the most popular social software in China, like Twitter in USA. Due to this reason, We created our own WeChat Official account named “IGEMxhdB PbBiosecure”. We used this resource to share more information about our topic and the progress of our project to our community.
We uploaded a total of nine tweets to our Wechat Official Account during July and August, including topics such as:
1. Popularization of what is lead pollution, the harming effects of lead pollution and the the ways of preventing lead pollution
2. Interview with experts
3. Popularization of synthetic biology & iGEM
4. Collaboration with other iGEM teams
5. Public engagements
6. Interesting stories that happened among our team
With the fast development of technology, internet has already become a better way to spread our projects. For instance, when we tried to give out our questionnaires on the street, we only collected dozens of data with hours of striving in the burning sun. However, after publishing the questionnaires on the internet for a few days, we received hundreds of feedback from different participants.
These tweets not only helped us to share our project to the public, but also helped us to collect feedback from public. We can know more about how others think about our project from the commentaries under each tweet so that we can make appropriate adjustments for our project. For example, when we published the article about the interview with a doctor, some people came to ask us about the relationship between synthetic biology and transgenic food. This allowed us to realize that many people have little knowledge about synthetic biology and its application in lead treatment, adding with the importance of our project.
(The QR code of our Wechat Official Account along with our team logo)