Team:ShanghaiFLS China/Public Engagement

ShanghaiFLS_China: Education and Public Engagement

Education and Public Engagement

We discovered that many people do not understand synthetic biology through distributing a questionnaire. Therefore, we decided to make a change. We believed in the mass education potential of the media. By launching a WeChat public account, we were able to reach an extended audience and share our knowledge regarding synthetic biology. Each article got hundreds of reads and tens of likes. We also collaborated with a student journal to reach an even wider audience. The opinion of the public mattered to us, and we decided to help the public generate better-informed opinions. Besides, members from Shanghai Foreign Language School are applying for a club and are planning to launch lessons on synthetic biology afterward.

We distributed a questionnaire after we determined the topic and collected 762 responses. We found out that a lot of people lacked basic knowledge about bioengineering. We launched a public account on WeChat and wrote multiple articles about molecular biology. We talked about the cell, the central dogma, gene regulation, microorganisms, biological engineering, and the human genome project. We wrote over 20,000 (20,632) words and were able to get more than 200 reads and tens of likes for each article. The following picture shows the number of views (left) and likes (right) we got on each article.

Our articles about the human genome project and about global warming will be published on a magazine in an international high school in Shanghai, World Foreign Language Academy (WFLA) in November. We were able to get samples of the magazine.

Besides, team members from Shanghai Foreign Language School are currently applying for a club in the school. If successful, the club will introduce more on molecular biology, both in theory and in practice.