Team:TUST China/Public Engagement
Public Engagement
WThis year, we want more people to be engaged in our projects and participated in the activities we organized which are more receptive and meaningful ways to carry on our humanistic work and propaganda.
Spreading Biology
Responsibility comes with the ability. As main iGEM teams in Tianjin, we are entrusted with the duty of spreading our concept and advanced knowledge for education.
We held several meetups with other universities in Tianjin, and discuss the appropriate approach to advocating rational analysis and creative thoughts during the CCiC. Eventually, we took the first step in high schools.
We listened to experts and contacted several high school in Tianjin. Teachers warmly welcome us to do and explain experiments for students. We went and met other teams there, we cooperated tightly for presenting a wonderful schedule containing: the concept of synthetic biology and its influence in reality, introduction of classic iGEM projects and example of our programs, non-toxic yeasts which showed different colors.
To our great surprise, we received countless fans of synthetic biology and they showed great passion about the amazing field. They listened carefully and asked questions actively. Afterwards, we introduced to them how to build a team and what is essential for team-building, they were really excited and couldnt help to join in the IGEM club. The energetic and creative thoughts provided us valuable inspiration about our program. It was our pleasure to expose them to shallow biology research.
Social Engagement
We are willing to introduce the advanced science to the public. Therefore, we went to a community near our campus, Shangdeyuan Housing Estate, and organized a workshop. People aged ranging 4 to 65 engaged our events and workshops to know more about synthetic biology.
The residents showed their curiosity about what synthetic biology is. Therefore, we introduce biosynthetic products and some commonly used antibiotic drugs around us.Although they are new to synthetic biology, they also have a preliminary understanding of it after our interesting introduction.
To evoke enthusiasm for science in children, we prepared several interesting experiments that were easy to carry out. To our surprise, children were quite into them. We also played games while educated them about knowledge of biology like making the cell model with the eraser, teaching them the structure of the cell, drawing DNA on a blackboard etc. Even though our activities had finished for a long time, people were reluctant to leave.
Humanistic care
College Entrance Examination is a fateful moment for Chinese students, which will affect their future life to a certain extent. Our team participated in the college entrance examination volunteer activities and went to Tianjin Tanggu District High School for psychological counseling and stationery help services. We watched children nervously enter and relax out with a sense of helpful joy. At the same time, we hope that our love can pass on to them the spirit of biological people, the purpose of igem, can affect their future interest in learning biology, to add talent to the world of biology.
Our HP activities do not want to be just a scientific porter, but also want to be a warm communicator. Our team has been volunteering in the Sunshine Garden after school. Recently, we carried our designed dolls around to the Sunshine Garden with us. We took these “older children” to play games, paint, build blocks and other intellectual development games with us. It can bring them joy. Of course, we're going to stick with it and not stop making friends with them at the end of the iGEM game.
TUST's iGEMer paid close attention to the health of these freshmen , so we followed them into the physical examination center and closely followed their health reports. In chatting with stomatologists, we found that people's oral problems are very serious nowadays: people in their 40s and 50s have tetracycline teeth problems, young people have oral problems caused by smoking, betel nut chewing, and teenagers have insect teeth problems. Doctors say tetracycline teeth are decreasing, but they are still very grim. Therefore, we also hope that through our HP activities we can call attention to oral health, attention to antibiotic use, from the root cause of the formation of tetracycline teeth.
