Education & Engagement

Education

22 September 2018 Workshop for secondary school students

We invited 30 students from a secondary school, Shatin Pui Ying College, to our university laboratory and conducted a whole day synthetic biology workshop “One Day iGEMer” with them. We started off our day with introduction of iGEM. For most of our participants, it was their first time for them to heard about the competition of iGEM. Then we reminded them of the laboratory safety and rules and taught them how to use micropipettes. Our team did a demonstration of minipreparation and explained the mechanism behind. Under our guidance, the students set up a PCR reaction mixture and started the thermocycler. After that, they did a restriction enzyme digestion, set up a agarose gel and performed gel electrophoresis. We also grasped the chance to introduce our RAPID project to them while they are waiting for the experimental results.

We received excellent feedback from teachers and students as we included many hands-on experience for the secondary students to put the theoretical knowledge they learnt in textbook into real practice. Our students enjoyed the workshop as much as we did.

Public Engagement

September 2017 CUHK’s Art Fair

CUHK’s Art Fair is the annual carnival, almost the whole university will be there. We grabbed the chance to sell jelly on petri dish to fundraise for our project, as well as to attract people to our booth. As we culture bacteria a lot at the lab, we thought that it would be a good idea to make jelly on petri dishes and taught the public how to streak plates using chocolate pens. Our jelly petri dishes received so much attention and were sold out very soon.

We distributed questionnaires and talked with non-science major students, professors and alumni about our project on that day.

October 2017 CUHK’s Information Day

Information Day is another big event, it’s the open day of the university. Parents and secondary students went to our university, and we also told them about our project and distributed questionnaires.

iGEM Meetups

25 July 2018 Eurasian Meetup

Our team together with around 20 teams went to ShenZhen to attend the Eurasian meetup, we presented in front of other teams and listened to other teams’ presentations. It was a perfect chance to look for potential collaborations.

15-17 August 2018 Greater Bay Area iGEM Synthesis Biology Development Forum

As the co-organiser of the forum, we invited South China University of Technology and University of Hong Kong to CUHK to have presentations on their projects. There was a debate section on the application of synthetic biology, to challenge participants to think more and reflect on what we’re doing to the community. We also had the chance to listen to a distinguished guest talk on bioinformatics. The 3-day forum was truly remarkable.

Team:Hong Kong-CUHK/Public Engagement