Team:Hong Kong UCCKE/Public Engagement
Public Engagement
School Open Day (Coverage: about 100 visitors)
The School’s 16th Anniversary Open Day was held on the 12 of January in 2019, and we set up an exhibition in the biology laboratory, hoping to introduce parents to synthetic biology, and engage students in it, so that the new sport can popularize in Hong Kong. In order to make it attractive to the audience and easy to understand, we exhibit simple apparatus and experiments that comes from our daily life and is more colourful.For example, using the microscope to investigate various types of food cells, using micropipette to test the pH of different colours, using VR to try dissect a human body. There is also an opportunity to check DNA with gel-electrophoresis.The exhibition received positive feedback from the audience which showed interest in our following IGEM projects, and we are honored to see synthetic biology pursued in Hong Kong.
Summer camp in HKUST (Coverage: 100 students)
This camp is held from the 5th of August to the 7th of August, aiming to teach students the basic skills of Genetic engineering and help them explore their potentials in the synthetic biology field. There were experiments on PCR validation for plasmids, Digestion and Ligation of DNA,Gel electrophoresis, and Bacterial Transformation. Past igem teams and professors from universities are also invited to give a talk. All students, including us, gained a much more profound conception on synthetic biology and had a taste of working in a lab.
Biology Research Team (Coverage: about 20 students)
The weekly course is held every single monday at 16:30-18:00 for both biology research team members and anyone who is interested in UCCKE. The course covers a compressive content of synthetic biology and science through both theory mentoring and wet laboratory work.
Hong Kong iGEM teams meetup
On the 28th of september, a meeting was held in UCCKE innospace where all the 2019 iGEM secondary school teams of Hong Kong came together. The aim of this meeting is to promote synthetic biology and iGEM among Hong Kong secondary schools, by exchanging ideas on their projects and giving each other suggestions on improving the project. Each iGEM team was also given the chance to do a full presentation as a practice in front of everyone, and a 5 minutes Q&A session afterwards. It is a good chance to boost the development and build a stronger team of synthetic biology in Hong Kong.
iGEM e-Learning Platform
A website was setup for future iGEM team’s use at this link. It is a e-learning site that contains 5 learning courses. 4 of them are basic science and synthetic biology courses with progressive levels for beginners to start with their relative level, while the other is a designated course for iGEM, suitable for students who are interested to join iGEM teams. This website is not only used in our school, but published to the general public. We hope to help the work of iGEM teams, and open the door of synthetic biology and iGEM to more people.