Teaching children knowledge about cells
We came to the poorest mountainous areas in western China and conducted our teaching activities four times to introduce cell knowledge and synthetic biology to children in Dapoping Elementary School to stimulate their interest and love for biology.Dapoping Primary School is located in a remote economic backwardness. There are only 9 students and 2 teachers in the primary school. They have no conditions and opportunities to accept biologically relevant knowledge.
We first understand the knowledge of the students and their understanding of the creatures, and find that they have little knowledge of the creatures, so we decided to teach them the most interesting and basic part of biology - cell structure and DNA replication, They then introduced synthetic biology to their interest in synthetic biology and interest in research.
Because the students never accepted the knowledge about the cells, we first let the students work with their imaginations and draw the image of the imaginary cells. During their painting, we will discuss what should be inside the cells. Structure and matter. In this easy-to-understand and interesting way, we introduced them to cell structure and organelles.
Show them what cells look like
In order to further deepen the students' understanding of the morphology of the cells, we tried to use the microscope from the school to let the students observe the cells.
At first we borrowed microscopes from the lab teachers, but the teacher refused us because the microscope was too expensive. Then we tried to add a microscope to the students in Dapoping Primary School through fundraising, but the money collected was not enough to buy a microscope for the students. When we were at a loss, our teacher told us that there will be some scrapped microscopes every year, suggesting that we can buy these scrapped microscopes from the school and then use the money from the donations to repair the microscope. We communicated with the lab teacher and tried to buy a scrapped microscope at the cheapest price. Our teacher agreed to our request. What we need to do then is to fix the microscope. We asked the students and teachers of the relevant profession for help, but fortunately the microscope's eyepiece and objective lens were not damaged. We replaced some parts and finally fixed the microscope. The slides used in the experimental observations are the slides of the cell morphology and structure that we deliberately retain in our cell experiments. Observing the cells is an experience they have never had before, and the students left a deep impression.
Introduction to DNA
We first introduced the DNA double-strand structure and replication process, then explained that humans are controlled by many small fragments on DNA, and then we introduce the concept of synthetic biology, which assembles parts together so that the organisms express different traits. We use different colors of plasticine to represent different parts. We add a piece of plasticine from the connected plasticine line, which means adding a gene to the DNA that allows the creature to show traits that it didn't have, such as allowing bacteria to produce what talent can produce. We also explain the important role of synthetic biology.
