Team:NYMU-Taipei/Public Engagement
High school students visit
--Develop High school students’ interest in synthetic biology
During the summer break, a group of senior high school students from different schools visited NYMU iGEM team wet lab. These students are passionate about synthetic biology, so they came to NYMU for short-term research in order to learn more about synthetic biology. We welcome them a lot every year. Seeing these young researchers is like seeing ourselves in the past.
Leading them to do the experiment, these students conducted some basic techniques in synthetic biology research, such as bacterial cell culture and transformation. The whole process took about two weeks, and we all got along happily. We believed that a new group of people will invest in synthetic biology research in the near future.
Board game developing
--Assistance in high school education
For the HP department, trying to design a board game is a new experience. In order to understand how the board game is actually produced, we visited lots of people. For example, students who have participated in the "Playing Beitou" course, our school's Game club, and Professor Yi Wen Tsai, etc., these people's experience and support let us can complete a board game.
This board game, iGEM NYMU No. 2 ver0.2.3, in our opinion, is good enough to provide other teams as a consult, playing a role in the promotion of synthetic biology, iGEM competition and even high school education activities. The reason why we called it a trial as each team can assign to different tasks. For example, teams with different projects may have different wet lab work.
Thanks to the people who helped us in the process. we hope that the iGEM NYMU No. 2 ver0.2.3 that we designed can help you, though we only provided Chinese version.
High school workshop
--Synthetic biology course for high school students in Huwei Senior High School
On a hot sunny day, we left Taipei and arrived at the south-central town of Huwei to talk about iGEM competition and some primitive knowledge of molecular biology with students of Huwei Senior High School. Huwei Senior High School is located in Huwei Town, Yunlin County, and is also the alma mater of one of our team members. We are very honored to have the opportunity to share our thoughts here.
In the beginning, we introduced the central dogma of molecular biology to the high school students, who are learning molecular biology for the first time. After they gradually understood what synthetic biology is, we shared with them our project and the difficulties we met.
Although we are faced with many problems, we still desire to spread the idea of synthetic biology to more and more people.
Putting up posters
--Promoting our project
While working on our project, our team found that a lot of talented students didn’t join our team because they missed out the information at the beginning of the school year. To let more of our community know about us and our project, we designed a promotion poster. We put up dozens of posters at our bus stops, the bulletin board of the Research Buildings, and popular stores near the school and the MRT station.
A lot of students contacted us, including freshmen eager to join our 2019 team. In addition to our pleasant surprise, a few professors and alumni were also interested in our project. They shared their related academic experiences with us and we learned a lot.