Team:BIT/Public Engagement
Education and Public Engagement
In this year's education and public awareness section, we aim to carry out the popularization of our project in respect of background science, strengthen the dissemination of synthetic biology and encourage more people to participate in the iGEM competition.
At the first, we want to learn more from teachers and experts. At the same time, we can help more other students learn about the knowledge. So we invited related teachers to give a lecture for our teammates and other Interested students in this regard.
Last semester, we held a science lecture for the students in High School Attached to Capital Normal University to systematically introduce the knowledge of synthetic biology. In order to let them have a clearer and more concrete idea about synthetic biology, we also invited them to do experiments in our laboratory so they can feel the charm of molecular cloning experiments themselves.
At the same time, last summer vacation, we also provided them with a two-week summer experiment course so that they could join us and do experiment with our guidance and tutoring, get the chance to participate in iGEM, master the corresponding experimental skills, and arouse their interest in becoming an iGEMer in the future. We also required them to keep the necessary experimental records and reports to cultivate their basic scientific research habits.
We have organized outdoor activities for freshmen and sophomores to help them better understand the basic concepts of synthetic biology; the game of Fun Time led them into exploring the charm of synthetic biology through interesting questions and answers. We ended the roadshow with the advance notice of our next lecture on synthetic biology.
Considering popularization of synthetic biology ONLY may be monotonous, we decided to make good use of the rich teaching resources in our university and turned to our teachers for help. Eminent professors from different fields coordinated and delivered a series of lectures on two topics, namely "Space Biology + Synthetic Biology" merely for the purpose of public education. Such lectures enable us to better introduce our project, spread our knowledge about oxidative stress injury and raise public awareness of it.
In this internet era, new media are certainly among the channels we have turned to in order to better popularize synthetic biology and let more ordinary people know the concept. We have focused on the operation of four platforms: Wechat, Weibo, Twitter and Bilibili. On our Wechat Official Account, we have not only informed subscribers of experimental progress and team cooperation, but also posted popular science articles. Our Weibo and Twitter have mainly recorded the daily progressing of the experiments. For Bilibili, we have uploaded two VLOGs to record our HP activities and daily experiments.