Team:Worldshaper-Shanghai/Public Engagement
Education and Public Engagement
Introduction
The project and iGEM provided us a great opportunity to dig into the new concept of biology--synthetic biology. We experienced numerous knowledge both inside and outside the laboratory that are hard to access as high school students. Not all people have such great chance to get experience like this or get any idea of what is synthetic biology. Through our survey, there are about 80% of people who have no knowledge about synthetic biology. To incorporate more people in to our project and generally in synthetic biology, we decided to put effort in public engagement and education. Through our public engagement, young children got nice experience and decent ideas of human DNA; adults got a chance to know facts about our projects. Education among high school classroom successfully learnt about the our anticipations toward synthetic biology to all the students.
Public Engagement in Hangzhou Low Carbon Science and Technology Museum China August 4
To give children a general idea about synthetic biology and the project that we are working on, we and six other iGEM teams conducted a science activity in Hangzhou Low Carbon Science and Technology Museum, China. More importantly, we want to let those children get involved and to arouse their curiosity in science; therefore, each team designed a game or experiment related to our work. For our team, we designed an experiment that can extract human DNA from saliva. With helps from members of XHD-WS-Wuhan-B and Worldshaper-XSHS, we successfully accomplished our lab section. Later our team members introduced our project and synthetic biology to the crowds. All of them showed their curiosity to our project, asking us many questions. Through our introduction and their responses, we learned that it is necessary to make the contents as simple as we could when we introducing. Most of them don’t understand and not interested in the principle behind the device, but the function. Most of the people expressed their anticipation to our biosensor, wishing they could use it one day, especially a patient with gout. There are some, however, questioned the portability and precision of our device. After introducing synthetic biology, some parents were every impress that high school students are doing such striking project. We hope it can inspire their children to do science in the future.
Through this public engagement we were really glad to see that there are so many children who have an interest in science and so many people interested in our project. And even more, some constructive suggestion that can improve our way of introducing the project and the project design:
- Through our introduction and their responses, we learned that it is necessary to make the contents as simple as we could when we introducing. Most of them don’t understand and is not interested in the principle behind the device, but the function.
- To make the device more convenient, the future portable kit should easy to carry. We decide to investigate some current monitoring kits or equipments that is related to us, finding someway to make our device looks tiny and easy to accepted by publics.
- Since publics want accuracy and precision, the fluorescence detection and data analysis method need chosed carefully. Onemore design should be taken into consideration, we plan to compare the design of test paper kit and the Magnetic Beads Kit in next work.
Introduction of Synthetic Biology and iGEM
Some of our team members have introduced our project, iGEM competition and synthetic biology at each of our schools, hoping to promote their passion for biology. Through our presentation, many high schoolmates became curious about our project and are very exciting to see its application. Some of them even asked more questions about the competition, for example, how to join iGEM and how’s the distribution of the works within a team. From the previous experiences, we tried to introduce our products and methods in a simple and vivid way; it is proofed efficient because everyone could easily understand. Afterward, we introduced briefly about iGEM along with synthetic biology. It is a new concept that most people haven’t had an idea. We are glad to see many of the high schoolmates got a basic idea of what synthetic biology is and became interested in such science.
Self-media platform
Moreover, in order to share our experiences and knowledges of attending iGEM, we publicized our project and researching processes in social media platforms (WeChat, Tweeter, Weibo). Followed pictures are the examples we published on these social platforms.
