Team:XMU-China/Public Engagement
This year our team XMU-China came to Xiamen Science and Technology Museum to advocate the synthetic biology and our project .The whole project about 3 parts, game, Poster and Wish Wall. First, the game part, children play the roles of antibody and antigen respectively, they battled to be the winner by RPS.After the game they all left a deep impression of the general method that our body fight with cancer. Second，Poster，we had some talkative teammates to take charge of this part, so many student from high school and primary school were attracted ,they crowded in front of the poster and listened to our announcers absorbedly. Finally, the Wish Wall part, after our diverse introductions about the synthetic biology, they had learn a lot about it, and some of them even inspire to give their contributions to synthetic biology, and want to attend the innovative, fantastic competition ——iGEM. It’s also a cheerful Day for our team to propagate the synthetic biology to so many children.
Fighting for Mooncake is a traditional activity spent with relatives or close friends in Xiamen area in order to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. Throughout the game, we advertised the iGEM to freshmen, and introduced our project this year. It was worth mentioning that we also collected solicited opinions from all the students about the feasibility of our disease detective device and treatment device with cell-free system this year. 86.7% of participants showed positive attitudes towards our detective device, with the common sense of this device could performed pre-diagnosis quickly to guide patients. 66.8% students thought that it was difficult to treat tumors with vesicles, but it was very promising.
In order to popularize the common knowledge of biology to the public and meanwhile to draw the public attention to synthetic biology, this year we xmu-china team visited to Yanwu Elementary School, volunteering to teach elementary students biology, introducing our team and work, and directing them to do some simple biological experiments. For instance, we let them extract DNA from bananas.
In the course of our introduction, the children of Yanwu Primary school expressed their great enthusiasm, responded positively to our interaction, and moreover they showed terrific zest for our introduction. In these next simple experiments, the children were thrilled to be involved in one of the experiments.
In the end, through our teaching and guidance, most of the children have achieved remarkable results during the experiments. After the event, Yanwu Elementary school students said they learned a lot of useful knowledge, and very happy to do these interesting experiments by themselves within our guidance.
Also, the teachers feed back that they think this activity is so meaningful, extremely hoping to hold more such events in the primary school campus.
