Team:Jilin China/HP/Engagement
ENGAGE WITH THE
NEXT GENERATION
Engagement
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Introduction
The Next Generation?
The next generation doesn't mean kids literally, But the group of people who
Gets to know synthetic biology for the first time and get curious about it.
It has no relationship with ages, positions, or something. If you start get curious about synthetic biology, you are part of them.
What will be shown in this page?
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Overall Preparations
Booklets - a Guide-in Textbook
Booklets are regarded as one of the most concise and attractive tools for public, which run through our EPE. We designed 3 editions of booklets, providing appropriate information for each age in a diverting but precise form. We have uploaded PDFs and offered a translated version onto our wiki, see HP Supplementary.
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STEM Platform
这里放屈老师的介绍
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Primary
Sketching Kit – An intuitive tool for curiosity.
For a convenient transportation and distribution, a box to content all necessary tools and materials for pupils was taken into consideration. After several group discussions and contacts with suppliers, we finally decided to use corrugated cases as containers. Each case would contain 2 disposable culture dishes with chloramphenicol add medium, 4 disposable sterile inoculating loop a booklet to introduce microorganisms and an instruction with a drawing template. (links to supplementary)
With the help of STEM Platform, we prepared a drawing class for pupils as our kit’s first trail. Culture dishes were prepared at the night before the day we set off, all materials were packaged that morning. Then, iGEMers begin their teaching day!
Why we choose pupils?
In our country, primary students received only basic science knowledge courses and seldom have chances to participate in a hands-on experiment. What’s more, their understanding of the micro world remains superficial. Some of them even hold the opinion that all bacteria are harmful but never have a look of those tiny lives. Letting them get a close look of microorganism in a macroscopic way may help them learn more about cytobiology and a vivid mechanism of molecular biology, which would stimulate their interest in further study. And, pupils are a group of people who are full of curiosity. Hence, we decide to hold a drawing class for them, by using bacterial liquid as pigment. Therefore, masterpieces come into being.
Happy Memories
We came to United Experimental School of AHSJU (Affiliated High School Jilin University) and Livon, where a series of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) classes was being held to pupils in whole Changchun city. All kids were at place when appointed time has come. Our iGEMers firstly guided them into the micro world. To our surprise, a question asked by our team members triggered a fierce rushing to answer!
Therefore, we helped kids equipped well and distribute them our sketching kits, teaching them how to draw with one-to-one instructions. Finally, more than 50 dishes were collected, sealed, and brought back into incubator by our members. Waiting for the blossom of artist works.
Online Communication Contributes to Feedback
After the class, we kept in touch with those kids and their parents, by creating a chatting group online. To our delight, the class successfully draw some kids’ attention, instead of purely having fun in drawing. On the way back to laboratory, they started asking us questions. Some screenshots and translations are listed below. (For privacy, we blurred their nickname and portrait)
🧒🏻@Rrrrrebekah🍩 Hello teacher. My name is Xinhe Liu. I have 2 questions that I don't understand: 1) why those bacteria have colors? 2) why skin color doesn't change when people got sick and bacteria were produced in the body?
👩🏻🏫@lar As what we have mentioned in class, the phenotype of living bodies (for example, the color of bacteria) is controlled by DNA. However, scientist can transform the DNA. The original version of this kind of bacteria doesn’t have color. But the bacteria we use today were added special kinds of DNAs that can produce color, which means we transform it to make it produce color~
👩🏻🏫The bacteria that cause illness are not transformed by us, so it won't change skin color.
🧒🏻Oh! I got it. Thank you teacher. I didn't catch it in class😜
It seems that this kid is interested in the color of bacteria, and he misunderstood the relationship between the colored and the harmful kind. Meanwhile, we realized that we taught too fast. The teaching skills needs to be improved. After a while, another kid asked questions:
👩🏻🏫Feel free to ask any questions at any time!😀
👦🏻Hello teacher. I'm Haoran Ma. I have a question for you.🙏 Bacteria can fall into two kinds, beneficial bacteria and harmful bacteria. What good could them do to human body? or will it could turn into harmful bacteria suddenly?
👩🏻🏫Beneficial bacteria vary a lot. Take lactobacillus as an example. The lactobacillus in our body can promote intestinal peristalsis, and they can activate immune cells to enhance immunity. The benefits that it could bring is a great many. 😀 And in recent study, scientists have found an amount of different kinds of bacteria have connections to cancer, hypertension and other illness, and their mechanisms are under discovering.
👦🏻Thanks, teacher👏🏻.
👩🏻🏫For the second question, I think the beneficial won't change into harm under stable conditions. However, if you take it in too much, the beneficial would be harmful, like diarrhea. 💩
👦🏻😱.
👦🏻Thank you for helping.
👩🏻🏫Actually, there're also some neutral bacteria in gut. They help the beneficial when the beneficial become dominated in gut while help the other on the contrary. In a word, microorganisms vary a lot. And gut microbial problems remain to be explored.
👩🏻🏫Thank you for your questions.😀
This kid paid more attention on the effect of bacteria. And his worrying proved the necessity of our class. However, we somehow failed to deliver the right concept to them in class. Our next class needs to be reconsidered.
Fantastic Works
One day passed, we checked dishes. Colonies had formed. Some of them are corresponding to the given template, some are not, while others are too abstract to recognize, but looks pretty. We believe they want to draw their own story! Then, we took dishes pictures and post them to the group. Before destroying them, we put them all together, and removed caps, taking a group photo!
Time to Conclude
This is our first time to be real teachers. We have to admit that we need to improve a lot: teaching skills, patience, communication skills with children, difficulty and pace of the courses… We hope that we can have more experiences in the future EPE activities, especially when talking with children and students. Then more people would be willing to learn about synthetic biology.
Of course, during the activity with the children, we were really surprised by their enthusiasm, curiosity and earnest. Although it would be a little hard for them to use inoculating loop or this is their first time to know what is E.coli, they truly have pure interest in science and nature. As an iGEMer, we definitely support them and guide them to the scientific world. It must be an unforgettable experience in their childhood.
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Special Courses for Junior High School
We need to teach step by step.
Synthetic Biology is not an easy concept for the public to understand. In order to let this word and its fantasy spread, we decide to do this step by step for better understanding. Due to our previous experience of the activities for primary school students from the whole city, we still went to the United Experimental School of AHSJU (Affiliated High School Jilin University) and Livon and set a serial special course for junior high school students there. In that school, there is a STEM Center which provides students STEM courses and activities. We first contacted manager of Livon STEM Center, Mr Baofeng Qu, asking for his advice.
After a brief introduction of iGEM and synthetic biology, he showed great interest in our project and strongly supported our EPE activities. He gave us some advice and what kinds of courses are suitable for the students there.
Why Juniors?
Drawing class for pupils cannot realize our passion to spread biological knowledge. Synthetic biology should be placed in a dominant place. Hence, we move our target to a higher level of students, hoping to arise their interest through a series of classes.
Trial and Error
After a thorough reflection of the drawing class, we decided to take more details into consideration. For instance, content should be checked by professional teachers. We first consulted Ms. Jingjing Yang, a biology teacher in their school to know about knowledge base of the students. Then we decided to start from the basic knowledge of biology. We wrote our teaching plans and sent them to the teacher who are responsible for junior class teaching. What’s more, one of our HPers wrote his plan in English, for practicing his language skills meanwhile leaving out translating process to upload.
This the first part of our serial courses. Due to our purpose to start from the easiest concept, the first part was about cell and micro biology. What is life? What is cell? What is eukaryote and what is pronucleus? What is e.coli? You can definitely find the answer this evening!
We also let them joint the cell structures using some rice, beans candies and chocolates. They did such a great job!
Here are some masterpieces!
Feedback
At the end of the class, we asked them to write some suggestions as well as some feelings on a small piece of paper. We received some: “I’ve learned about cells!” “There are still some concepts I can’t understand.” “You’re a great teacher!”……
Synthetic biology is funny, I’m interested.
A little bit confused. Prokaryotic? Candy is tasty!
I want more chocolate beans!
Learned some structures of those cells. Teachers are friendly!
Looking forward to tomorrow’s class!
I memorized the words ‘cell’ and ‘microorganism’.
Good luck, Jilin China!In the second part, students would be taught gene’s function, structure, central dogma and enzymes of genetic engineering. This part of knowledge is full of boring ATCGs but they have to overcome before seeing the magic world. We decided to guide them in meanwhile doing some challengeable gene’s work, by repeating scientists’ research path. Another objective of our education is to stress the importance of safety. Hence, despite the guiding questions part, we designed a debate about genetic modified food for them. There is a widespread rumor that all genetic modified food is harmful or potentially harmful. We firstly introduced some good example of those food, then asked their reason whether and why they would eat them. To our surprise, they are open to this topic:
I think some genetic modified food have been tested for a long time, which is enough to prove that they’re not harmful. I would not be afraid of eating them.
A large portion of kids agree with his opinion. They also agree with it that whatever modified food would be welcome if they have been tested thoroughly. but when they were told all McDonalds and KFCs in China are using genetically modified soybean oil, they changed their mind.
The last part of this course was an activity about connecting gene sequence, and finding the open reading frame, we gave them slips of paper that are printed pieces of sequence, each one had 2 repeated parts that were the same as other papers. They were asked to connect them to form a complete sequence and find the start codon. All kids were engaged into this activity. Then the second class was finished.
Journal
In a word:
I missed the first part of classes and was astonished when my part began. They just keep talking, asking, and doubting, which has a huge difference at college classes, even my junior classes. I reorganized my teaching plan for several times to make it flow better, but, they pushed me forward each time, making me much more nervous.
Need to Improve:
I failed to control the time, so the last activity was successful. I planned to help them to realize the process of dealing with genes. However, I couldn’t articulate my game rule. After my part, I reconsidered my game. I should have printed the double strain DNA with restrictive sites, which fits more to the topic of engineering.
Future Work
Students did show great interest in biology and we have impressed them a lot. On the last day of the courses, several students said to us, “I want you guys to be the teachers of our school”, which really touched us. However, we can’t be their teacher forever, and we definitely want to show them the magic of science, so we decided to give courses to the science teachers there. Then, the teachers can teach them about synthetic biology during their daily teaching. Because synthetic biology is based on different subjects, not only biology teacher, but the chemistry, physics, computer teachers are welcomed in our activities. After our serial course, Mr Qu told us good news that senior high school of AHSJU and Livon is in construction, we hope that someday the students can participate in iGEM competition as a high school team in the future!
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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 understood the subject, including synthetic biology. Without the 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 walked into 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 observations and practices may cause difficulty in memorizing experimental protocols or failed to achieve their design function. We planned to offer them chances to try, under our guidance and explanation. At last, we succeed. 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!
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Winter Camp
Under Way
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TEDxJLU
Why TEDx?
A TEDx event is organized by volunteers from the local community, and just like TED events, it lacks any commercial, religious, or political agenda. Its goal is to spark conversation, connection, and community. --from Wikipedia
TEDxJLU has gain its reputation among Jilin University for its seasonally held sharing conferences and monthly culture salon, which attracted thousands of top students who have strong passion. Previous teams have held events about synthetic biology before. But due to the Gian Jamboree is going to be held ahead of this year’s sharing conferences, we decided to hold a salon.
Suggestions First
We consulted the president of TEDxJLU Club, for advises about contents of this event, and publication methods. He suggested us:
1. It’s an public activity, contents should be attractive and comprehensible enough for people who are not at your major.
We neglected this issue, indeed. We take more serious to the contents this time but make it harder to understand and more boring. Hence, we decided to add more living examples to our speech, meanwhile bring back the activity we used in junior classes – “Built Gene Circuit” by the “Cir-Kit”.
2. Pay attention to the time. it’s not a class, too short will be useless, but too long will be sleeping.
We reorganized our strategy, arranging more teammates to stand on the stage, while they will be distributed parts of speech respectively.
Time to discuss again!
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SynEvents: Welcome!
Welcome to Our Major!
Another freshmen year come! We seized the opportunity of the coming of new arrivals to spark curiosity.
Our school have 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 attract attentions. And we were all fun.