Team:Jiangnan/Public Engagement

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Team

• Team Members
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Human Practice

• Overview
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Model

Notebook

• Lab Book
• Protocol

Project

• Background
• Design
• Demonstration
• Result
• Part

Public
engagement
and
education

Overview

Jiangnan iGEM team has stepped out of the lab to disseminate knowledge on synthetic biology, vaccination and the concept of our project to the public.

Interactions

with

kindergarten children

(June 4th and June 8th)

According to our preliminary market research, we found that the public didn’t pay sufficient attention to children’s education on vaccination. We are thus motivated to organize a compulsory teaching to kindergarten children on vaccine related knowledge.

In June, we went to Xuelang Kindergarten and Swan Lake Kindergarten to let children understand the importance of vaccination, remind the teachers and parents of these children on the vaccination status of their kids so that these children could get vaccinated in time.

In order to introduce basic concepts and roles of vaccination to small kids, we prepared a cute slide and some small gifts. We also brought some painting materials and guided these kids to draw some bio- and vaccine- related cartoons . In this way, we could know what biology looks like and how vaccination functions from children’ eyes.

One of our team members, Bingyan Shen, has ample experiences in teaching small kids. Firstly, she showed them a cartoon of vaccine downloaded from the internet as the warm up to catch children’s attention. Then she asked them some simple questions on vaccine, and interacted with the children using gifts to stimulate their enthusiasm. Finally, she asked them to show what biology and vaccination looks like in their imagination through painting. Not only the children felt full of fun while learning, we also took it as a precious opportunity to learn something about vaccine and bio-world.

Besides direct interactions with the children, we also care whether parents are aware of the importance of vaccination. So we designed flyers and questionnaires on vaccination related information and asked parents to give feedbacks.

Lecture
in
senior high school

(July 7th)

We went to Wuxi No. 1 High School to introduce and stimulate students’ interests in synthetic biology. We also introduced our project to them to help them gain a deeper understanding on synthetic biology.

Our lecture is consisted of four parts: vaccination, our project, synthetic biology and iGEM. In the vaccination part, we mainly talked about the mechanism and types of vaccines, as well as the importance of vaccination. Through this introduction, both the teachers and the students have deepened their understandings on the significance of vaccination. The second part of the lecture is about our project,which is also a topic on how a new vaccine can be developed using synthetic biology approaches. We found that this part is too specialized as some students who did not know anything about laboratory could not understand the topic well. To help them gain the basic idea of synthetic biology, we played an short video on this topic that was downloaded from Ted. This video attracted lots of attention and gave them a vivid explanation on synthetic biology. We talked about Biobricks to the audience, and most of them showed great curiosities. Finally, we introduced iGEM to them, with the hope that they may take an active part in this interesting competition some day in the future.

After the lecture, several students asked us some related questions, we were very happy to see that these young students were desired to learn more about synthetic biology. We believed that such communications should not stop at the classroom level, but should be brought steps further to the lab. We thus decided to organize an Openlab Day when we could take the students out to the lab and show them some cool stuff used in practical experiments.

Open lab(July 14th)

In order to let high school students really feel the charm of biology, we held the activities called Plate Colony Painting. We invited some high school students to the public lab of our university to participate in this event. We prepared some plates and E. coli, and asked them to innovate in the plates.

These students were given safety training by Yini Luo, one of our team members, before they were allowed to create imaginations with the plates and bacteria. These students indeed had full of fun, and we believed that they must had felt the charm of synthetic biology through participating in this event.

Sythetic biology
festival in Hangzhou

(August 19)

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On August 19, our team and ZJU-China, ZJU-China, ASTWS-China, HFLS-ZheJiangUnited, WorldShaper-XSHS co-organized the Synthetic Biology Technology Festival at the Science and Technology Museum in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. In order to give children a preliminary understanding on biology and to stimulate children's interest, we organized many mini games such as ecological bottle besides giving lectures to help them learn things while having fun.