Difference between revisions of "Team:ShanghaiTech/Public Engagement"

Education and
Public Engagement

Education

Presently, there is a unignorable gap between book learning and actual experiments condition among Chinese high school students. The development of design thinking for biology experiments needs further improvements. Synthetic biology is "an emerging discipline that uses engineering principles to design and assemble biological components". The standardized biobrick and engineered experiments procedure provides high school students with lower barriers to design their own biology experiments. This year we held four lessons for high school students from ten high schools in Shanghai, instructing them to design their own research plan with basic synthetic biology knowledge.

Our lessons were divided into four interesting topics: “Introduction to synthetic biology”, “Thinking method of synthetic biology”, “Design strategies of synthetic biology” and “Cutting-edge biology technologies”. Besides introducing basic techniques and components synthetic biology includes, our team members used specific experiment conditions and applications to instruct students building better understanding of biobrick. Moreover, we set our team’s project as an example, showing how we solve problems we had met during our experiments. What we tried to do is to teach the high school students how to think and solve problems like real biologists.

Surprisingly, after four lessons, these adorable high school students showed great interest in synthetic biology and a brand-new thinking method when we asked them to design experiments by themselves. For instance, one of the students had an idea of editing different kinds of resistance genes into one particular cell. in this way, whatever the rough environment it is facing, it can synthesis corresponding proteins to help itself to survive. We also share our project this year to the high school students. At the tip of our topic, a girl had some interesting thoughts. She said one of her classmate was whiter under the sun so as her family. We guessed that it was controlled by gene. She wanted to use the feedforward loop in our project to express the magical gene.

Through our teaching, students expressed interests in iGEM and biology experiments, wishing to do their own science research in the future. From naïve view to serious thinking, we expanded their cognition with what we learned from our experience such as experiment trouble shooting and breakthrough ideas.

iGEM Club

Continuity of the knowledge, experience and memory of participating in iGEM are other points our team would like to emphasize. At the very beginning of this year, we set an iGEM club in our school and convened students who were interesting in iGEM and synthetic biology. By holding regular academic meetings and activities, we are helping students to build basic understandings of iGEM and synthetic biology, and inspiring them to further explore the tremendous potential of cross-disciplines between their various majors and synthetic biology.

Our meeting was given by team members or whoever wants to share their opinions on synthetic biology. We introduced frontier technologies like cell-free as well as inspiring applications of synthetic biology. iGEM club is a direct way for students in ShanghaiTech to approach iGEM, which helps develop the love and understand of finding interesting idea about synthetic biology. We hope our team’s spirit as iGEMer can be shared by this way.

To pass on the information about synthetic biology to more people, we established our social media platform, we chat public account. Through this platform, we shared what we talked about synthetic biology in iGEM club with people from all walks of life.

iGEM club is an effective way for students in ShanghaiTech and even more people who use our social media platform to approach iGEM, which helps develop the love and understand of finding interesting idea about synthetic biology. We hope our team’s spirit as iGEMer can be pass on by this way.

Biosafety

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The operation rule of bio-lab in China requires improvements. Recent years, several iGEM teams make efforts to emphasize biosafety in lab. However, systematic material and methods about biosafety education is needed for further popularization in larger scale. This year iGEM team ShanghaiTech have achieved complete design of biosafety materials and popularized them in ShanghaiTech University.

Biosafety handbook : Fundamental laboratory safety & Important safety attentions. Amusing & Attractive

Flash courseware: Effective interactivity leads to deep impression.

Biosafety video : Enhance learners’ memory of the fallible matters vividly.

VR game platform: Learning with great fun.