Team:Jilin China/HP/Engagement/More

More Engaging
Activities


Engagement

  • Become "High School iGEMers"

    For high school students, we take the chance of the "Training plan for middle school students" scientific and technological innovation reserve talents" ("elite plan" for short), a national program to select a group of high school students who have excellent performance and a strong passion to scientific research, encouraging them to walk into campus, to experience in technological clubs, research programs and practices, etc. Our iGEM laboratory is open to them.

    We believe each beginner needs practical experiences before understanding the subject, including synthetic biology. Without the boring but intensive experiment process, biobricks’ function cannot be realized. Since they’re top students in biology and got the opportunity to come to the lab for several days, it was a good choice to teach them some basic skills.

    At the beginning, we invited them to visit several labs which are designed for different usage. They feel the same as we entered college at the first time – professional, which exactly fits our objectives. One student said:

    I got this chance by my hard work and a little fortune. My efforts finally paid back. The activity achieved my dream of participating into college labs, which are far beyond the so called laboratory in high school club.

    Practices are the best teachers. Here are some basic skills that non-experimenters have, for instance, the usage of pipettes and centrifuge, or how to run gels. Without enough observations and practices, it would be difficult to memorize experimental protocols and achieve the design function. We planned to offer them chances to try, under our guidance and explanation. At last, we succeeded. One of the students once wrote in his reflection:

    The teaching idea and pattern have essential differences between high school and college lab.

    Besides the practices and experiments, we also introduced our booklets to them, which enhanced their understanding of synthetic biology and work in our lab. As top students in school, it is their quality that being good at asking questions and thinking seriously. After reading the booklets, they raised some questions and we talked about those problems with the professors. We were also high school students two or three years ago, we could share similar feelings in science, so we were able to help them well. We believed that they had learned a lot from both the well-designed booklets and the guidance of the professors and the iGEMers.

    Professors and teachers are friendly and easy-going here. And I also like the seniors. It’s just the time passed too fast. I’ll keep my experiences here as a seed expecting it sprout someday!

  • Debate

    With the development of gene-editing technology, Biology Safety is the accompanying issue. Is bioproduct safe? Is there any ethic question? Can those products be widely used in China and this world? In order to know how public think about this question among campus, a debate with the topic ‘’was held in October, 2018. The heated discussion did raise people’s awareness.

  • Online Engagement

    Engagement online cannot be neglected. We inherited the WeChat Subscription and Twitter from previous team, meanwhile offering a more professional platform for anyone who are following us.

  • Welcome to Our Major

    Another freshmen year is coming! We seized the opportunity of the coming of new arrivals to spark curiosity.

    Our school has published a plan for new comers since 2009, to form a individual class with five directions, for selected students who earn high score, in order to cultivate world-class and high-quality reserve talents in fundamental subjects. We thought it would be a good chance to enroll more students to choose biological direction, and to attract a wider public attention of synthetic biology.

    We chose this time because there were lots of students and their parents walking around on the center square of our campus, looking for the stalls belong to colleges respectively, or just pacing to experience their new environment. It’s a place crowded with freshness. We believe our activity would be popular.

    It was a little bit hurry, but we still prepared small games, booklets, posters and stickers for the upcoming freshmen. Unfortunately, when we went downstairs, it was raining, not too heavy but a little disturbing. We sat at a stall for a while, seldom people come. And wind always blew down our poster. But finally, there were still some people to come a visit, and had a look.

    We need a lot of people to participate in our games, so we move our equipment to another more crowded place, and it did worked. We held a knowledge contest, by putting question papers into our recycled box of Sketching Kit. If participants answered the question they randomly selected, they would be given a sticker as a gift. It indeed attracted attentions. And we were all fun.

  • Winter Camp

    In order to provide more opportunities for Jilin University students, we specially started a Synthetic Biology Winter Camp and welcomed all the students in our school. Nearly 100 students joined us, and molecular biology, microbiology, cell biology and also synthetic biology were provided by our team members. Except those theoretical courses, the campers learned previous brilliant iGEM projects with the guidance of iGEMers. Some of them even showed their own opinions towards those projects. Many campers felt satisfied with this opportunity and hoped to learn more about synthetic biology to be an iGEMer in the future!

  • iGEMinar

    Winter camp has given us a chance to allow more people know what synthetic biology is, however, this attracting concept should be popularized continuously. Then we set up iGEMinar (iGEM + seminar) activities especially for students who got great interet in synthetic biology. The activity was held twice a month, anything about synthetic biology is welcomed. Heated discussion and serious attitudes are here!