Team:Hong Kong JSS/Public Engagement
Public Engagement
Weekly Course (Coverage: 45 students)
The weekly course is held every single tuesday at 16:30-18:00 for both biology research team members and anyone who is interested in UCCKE. The course covers a compressive content of synthetic biology and science through both theory mentoring and wet laboratory work. The content taught in this series of course are as follow.
Principle of Synthetic Biology
Techniques of Synthetic Biology (With wet-lab experience)
3A Assembly
Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)
Gel Electrophoresis
Laboratory safety
Laboratory skills and Preparation
The course has received very positive feedback from our student too. The course have grown from a total participant of 12 to around 45 participants (including staff members) and is currently one of the most famous Co-Curricular Activities in our school, attracting a lot of newcomers every year. We are working on building a much larger team and creating a stronger bond between the teammates.
For every topic mentioned before, we created a set of teaching materials including fact sheet, worksheet, protocol and quiz. We do this to ensure that they will understand and remember those techniques easily. The following image is a part of our fact sheet for transformation. A link to download all materials in zip format is provided below the image.
Summer camp in HKUST (Coverage: 70 students)
This camp is held on the 3rd of August to the 5th of August in HKUST. Camp content includes experiments about transformation and polymerase chain reaction. Also teachings about basic knowledge of central dogma.On the last day,we hosted a talk by our team and professors from universities. All students gained a lot and have a taste of working in lab.
Sharing to students (950 students)
We hold public sharing on science, particularly synthetic biology and our 2018 iGEM project, to the fellow students and teachers in our school. What we have done over the years is fruitful and have definitely match our aim to cultivate a research and science atmosphere in 4 schools.
Team members training (25 students)
During the summer vacation (July to August) this year while preparing for this project, the core team( including the iGEM team) received training from the experts of handling the aquaponics system. One of the research interest of this project, to learn more about aquaponics and the method of managing it, such as testing water pH, ammonia concentration, nitrite concentration and nitrate concentration, which they are closely related to the fate of the organisms living in water . Besides, they also discussed the problems that may occur in the aquaponic system, and the respective approaches to tackle them. We gained a positive feedback from our members about the training, our teammates were inspired a lot through the learning and managing progress, which this phenomenon is what we aimed to hold this training programme.
Hong Kong iGEM teams meetup (10 High schools, 1 University)
On the 22nd of september, a meeting was held in UCCKE where 11 schools including secondary schools and universities of Hong Kong are invited to join a HK iGEM meeting, the aim of this meeting is to promote iGEM among Hong Kong secondary schools, and to also give a chance to 4 iGEM teams (teams who will attend the jamboree this year) to do a full presentation as a practice which includes the 5 minutes Q&A session. We also exchanged ideas to the other schools about how we feel participating iGEM this year.
iGEM Tools and e-Learning Platform
eTools
Courses
Content of the course
A website was setup for future iGEM team’s use at https://ucckeigem.org. It is separated into two parts, tools and e-learning platform. Tools (https://ucckeigem.org/tools) includes common tools which iGEM teams need to use, such as sequence formatting, sequence comparison etc. The e-learning platform (https://ucckeigem.org/learn) is a e-learning site with 5 courses for students who are interested to join iGEM teams at the school. We hope that the website can help igem teams work with their project and open the door to iGEM to more people.
Hong Kong JSS
Contact
hkjsigem@gmail.com