To include more people in participating in work in synthetic biology and promote both iGEM and us in the local community, we made efforts in education, propaganda, and a board game.

In order to promote public awareness of synthetic biology and introduce its basic ideas to the laymen, our team is devoted to the development of a board game which aims at instructing non-biologists to understand what biobricks can do and how can we use them to make new things.

As games have become a significant part of our spare time, and most youngsters would rather play games to have fun. We consider it a perfect opportunity to introduce synthetic biology to them.

To attract more people without such background to be interested in this area, we develop this board game specially designed for synthetic biology. In this game, even laymen can have fun. We greatly weakened the hardcore and annoying part of synthetic biology when we keep the main idea of it.
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In our broader community, there's a café called USTC1958, which is the highest rating café in Hefei, according to the internet. We consider it a great way to interact with them. They may add color to our project while we can add new elements for them.

Talking with the café owner, she spoke highly of our projects and enthusiasm, and also showed great interest in synthetic biology. As an attractive café owner, she provided brilliant suggestions for our team name, logo, and uniform. Since we don't have a teammate in the art relating majors, their advice had a great influence on us.

Meanwhile, we gave an overview of synthetic biology to them. They were interested in it and willing to add some "synthetic" elements in the café. We offered to rendered our board game, which may help the customer kill time and subtly teach them some aspects of synthetic biology. Thus we can make complex scientific information flow into the community.

It's really marvelous that more and more people will start learning with games and coffee.

At the very beginning of our project, we came up with an idea of making a promotional video for the children and teenagers. Considering they may not know much about synthetic biology or even biology, we made our video uncomplicated and cute, only want to encourage them to step in and explore by themselves. We believe it's the best way to appeal to an amateur.



Teenagers, especially kids, love cartoons. Through our fascinating video, the children not only gained happiness but also increased their biological knowledge. We contacted the Bureau of Education of Yongji County, Jilin City, Jilin Province, hoping that we could play our video in a primary school. They are pleased with our idea and speak highly of our popular science work. Then our video was permitted to be played in all of the schools there. The influence was beyond our expectation, and the pupils and junior students were indeed stimulated by the marvel world of synthetic biology.

How do we say that? The teachers there mailed us, retelling several questions; for example, in the first edition of our video, we simply implant the "Fragrant Gene" and complete the workflow, which is inaccurate. Some students were confused if that's all we need to perform synthesis. We then replied, answering the question, and modified our video. We regard such positive feedback as our success in the effort of education towards the youngers.

Besides this, we also planned to promote synthetic biology to high school students. For sure, the video we made seems too simple to them, so we decided to present them a lecture, namely, a lesson. Back to his alma mater, our biology team leader Suyang Zhong gave his junior students a speech about biology and synthetic biology.

According to the biology teacher, current students prefer to spend more time studying math or physics. Though they are indeed the basis of biology, it's also true that they are more likely to choose other majors after going to college.

In the lecture, we first introduced the fantastic biology world. Then we elaborated on what is synthetic biology about and what is iGEM Foundation. Of course, we propaganda our team and our project. They listened carefully, seemed that we had Ignited their passion for biology. And we sincerely hope these potential students can join us, becoming the future generation of iGEMers.

Our university has made significant achievements in physics and math, and we have plenty of undergraduates majoring in them. However, we found our mates knew little about synthetic biology and iGEM. Therefore, Team USTC and we held a meeting in our university to popularize synthetic biology and present our projects to the entire school, trying to absorb new force.

In our meeting room, students, namely, our potential iGEMers from all kinds of majors, listened carefully. We told them what is synthetic biology in detail, like how a synthetic biologist works, and what we have acquired during this year's project. They are deeply fascinated by the world of synthetic biology that we described. During our Q&A time, they asked many questions and were eager to know what do they need to join us. We were surprised by their enthusiasm, and it seems that we successfully intrigued more people participating in synthetic biology.

By presenting lectures at schools and introducing our project into the broader community, we are sure such activities can help promote synthetic biology and iGEM. We interacted with many schools and successfully promoted mutual learning and engagement. We also thought seriously about the difference between elementary students and undergraduates, using different methods to promote synthetic biology instead of using only one type of propaganda. Meanwhile, we made some efforts to collaborate with our broader community. We talked with a popular café and introduced our project. Then we designed a syn-bio relating board game and rendered them for their customers. No one can say no to coffee and games, and so do someone may love biology. We're sure such activities can enable more people to contribute and participate in synthetic biology. Our works are bitter like coffee, but the rewards are pleasant like board games.