Team:UCAS-China/Public Engagement

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

From bacterial painting activity to online game iGEM Diary, from “3 Minutes for Science” competition to National Science Day, we sought more creative and efficient ways to share interest of science also establish dialogues with the public.

Foretaste of creating personal art and science work

Hoping to engage more interested students directly in creation of art and science work, also attract other students to know about it, on July 11th, we invited high school students from BNDS and college students from math, physics and other non-biology-relating majors to our lab. We helped them to master some basic experimental skills and create their personal bacterial paintings.

In the activity, our E. coli played the role of adding color to the paintings. 5 kinds of engineered E. coli could express different kinds of chromoprotein, including aeBlue, amilGFP, fwYellow, eforRed and SpisPink. During the procedure of painting with cotton swabs and bacterial fluid, the patterns were all colorless. But with the incubating time passing by, E. coli expressed and accumulated more chromoproteins, the painting got brighter and more colorful gradually. As the foretaste of creating their personal art and science work, we popularized more than biological theories behind, but a pioneering idea of combining art and science creatively.

3 Minutes for Science

To make our sound heard by more people, we stood upon a wide stage to talk to more people about our enthusiasm! See more in Gold-3 Minutes for Science Page..

Domino

For much easier understanding of our scientific design, we use domino to make a creative video to explain how our gene circuit works. See more in Gold-Domino Page..

iGEM Dairy

We made an online game developing by the form of an iGEMer’s diary. As a member in UCAS-China, you need to balance study, iGEM work and leisure time. You may fail the exam if you don’t pay enough attention to your study, also if you are too tired, you will be ill. And if you always be perfunctory about your iGEM work, you may be regarded as unqualified and have no chance to go further as an iGEMer. You may meet a series of challenges and obstacles like we used to, but you will also enjoy the whole procedure, winning glory, friendship and growth finally. we tried to share our daily life, precious memories and interesting experience with others in this way. And hope you’ll enjoy the journey and like to be a part of iGEM like us.

National Science Day

We actively took part in the series of science popularization activities of National Science Day. Submitting a series of articles about our daily life inside and outside the lab as iGEMers, popularizing synthetic biology knowledge, making videos and shared all these original resources in our channel in WeChat, all things we devoted to showed or concern and close connection with the public. As the result of our effort, more than three hundred people followed us, and many articles have been read and liked by far more people than that. More and more people told us that it was our channel that stimulate his great interest to iGEM and synthetic biology.

Podcast

Lewis Sandler invited us to have a nice talk about biology with him! “What do you think is synthetic biology?” “Why do you choose biology?” “What led you to the combination of art and science?” Want to know our opinion? Come and join us in this special podcast with coffee and synthetic biology! https://itunes.apple.com/cn/podcast/origin-of-words-podcast/id366796940?mt=2 ..

Science videos

Making video is a popular and efficient way to share ideas and popularize science. We also made some videos to teach anyone who is interested in synthetic biology the most basic things in labs such as the usage of clean bench and pipettes, how to do PCR or the way to extract plasmid. But different from other videos, we had our own way to make scientific experimental guidance more interesting and much easier for understanding. Our audience spoke highly of them and encouraged us to share more ideas and anecdotes in the lab. Click to learn and have fun with us!

Since WeChat has been widely used in China, we kept running our WeChat Channel to get more people know us and iGEM competition. We have shared our videos, science popularization passages and interesting daily life inside and outside our lab. Thanks to all our readers and supporters!