Team:SYSU-Medicine/Public Engagement
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EDUCATION AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
1. Wechat Official Account
We ran an account on WeChat and published 6 scientific articles with reading quality more than 5000.
Numerous articles on our Wechat Official Account
Putting some background science of our project on our account
Wechat has invaded the lives of Chinese since it’s invention. Nowadays, the quickest way to spread news and ideas is by Wechat Official Account. It’s just like twitter or facebook. We wanted to let more people into the realm of biological engineering, so we opened our own account igem2019. It’s intentions are to educate the public about biological engineering and for team propaganda. We put on articles about biological engineering introductions, introduction of oncolytic viruses, cancer chemical therapeutic drugs, modeling in biological engineering and even how bioengineering collaborates with food. It can also act as a team’s log, recording the twists and turns and historical moments of our team. Up to now, thousands of people have continued to follow us in order to learn the latest news of synthetic biology and our product.
2. YGA supporting education
During the summer vocation, our team took the opportunity to participate in YGA program where we have supporting education for high school students in remote regions. YGA is a summer camp held by Medical School of Sun Yat-sen University, which contains three weeks of supporting education in Meizhou city, an undeveloped region in Guangdong. Students from The University of Hong Kong (HKU), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Peking University (PKU), University of Macau, Fudan University (FDU) and other 13 universities all came together to participate in YGA program. During the program, we had created lessons about synthetic biology for high school students. “What is synthetic biology?”,” How can synthetic biology change the world?”. Then we asked students to think about their ideal world filled with synthetic biology. The last part is the introduction of oncolytic virus. In this part, we hoped students can understand some simple questions of oncolytic virus. “What is oncolytic virus?”, “What’s the function of oncolytic virus?”, “How can oncolytic virus benefit to humans?” “How can we engineer the virus to make it more useful?”. During the class, students had been paying great attention to the content of the class. They showed great interest in synthetic biology and oncolytic virus. At break, some students brought their biology textbook to the platform, telling us that they had learnt some basic content of virus and ask for more details about oncolytic virus and the correlation between virus and synthetic biology.
During this supporting education, our goal was to promote synthetic biology, developing new opportunities to encourage more people to learn about synthetic biology and to shape it. Oncolytic virus is also an important part we wanted to promote, since this kind of therapy was not as widespread and popular as other biotherapies. Therefore, we aimed to change the way people think about oncolytic virus and we fortunately got the positive feedback.
