Talking to high school students
One of our team members, Guo Fuyu, went to Hutian Middle School in Huaihua, Hunan Province. He introduced systems and synthetic biology to the students and helped them with biology in high school as well. In our view, it is of fundamental significance to provide as much middle school students in second-tier cities in China as possible with access to frontier science, since quality education is definitely as important as examination-oriented education. (Figure. 1)
Guo Fuyu talking with middle school students in Hutian Middle School
According to a survey in Peking University, freshmen who have had a sense of higher education and sought for their interest in high school, get accustomed to college life and study remarkably faster than those who haven’t. We genuinely hope university students and professors across China can communicate more with high school students and help every single one find his or her interest worth pursuing their whole life as soon as possible. We especially hope that the students in second-tier cities and rural areas get the same chance of quality education as those in megacities.
Pre-school scientific education
While the idea to introduce the most cutting-edge science to children in kindergarten may sound outlandish, we can still spend a nice day with them and introduce them to science. Two of our team members did this in the kindergarten attached to Peking University. We designed a series of games with a science background: demonstrating the three phases of water, observing phase separation, constructing a “phase separation” system with magnetic balls, and water drawing. The kids liked these games very much which inspired us a lot.
It is a big challenge for us to tell the children about basic science, but we’re happy to see them enjoying the games which is also interesting and relaxing for us. We enjoyed the fascination with science, which can cross the boundary of age and life experience.
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| Kids playing marbling paint together | Ouyang Xiaoyi teaching kids about three states of water |
This activity made us confident about the perspective of broad-based scientific communication, and we realized the we can communicate in both a “meaningful” and “interesting” way, where all the participants are equal and relaxed and the conversation is much more efficient.
Documentation of Peking iGEM as enlightenment for beginners
We have built up a WeChat public platform which is a worldwide platform with billions of users for documentation, communication and popularization. To give the future igemers a taste of igem projects and help them learn the basic rudiments of synthetic biology we have reviewed the projects of Peking iGEM in the past 14 years. All these articles are rather approachable and most of them received positive feedbacks. We demonstrate here the articles and hope it may help more people who want to get to know about synthetic biology.
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| 2007 | 2008 |
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| 2009 | 2010 |
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| 2011 | 2012 |
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| 2013 | 2015 |
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| 2016 | 2017 |
Popular video about phase separation in biology
We made a popular video about phase separation in biology to introduce it to more people studying the subject. We posted it on several websites in China and many undergraduates and graduates were introduced to phase separation through our video. We also found it necessary to communicate more about basic knowledge of different disciplines in the area of systems biology. This is arguably the best way in which people can learn about the system they work on and cooperate better with each other.
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