Human Practice

Science and Technology Week

Science and Technology Week is a large-scale, centralized science popularization campaign organized by University of Science and Technology of China. This year, Science and Technology Week attracted over ten thousand citizens to USTC, varying from innocent pupils, high school students and college students in biology-related majors to the public from all walks who may have limited knowledge of Synthetic Biology. Our team cooperated with Team USTC and offered visitors a feast of biological knowledge and a chance to cultivate interest in biology. We introduced elementary knowledge of genetics to citizens by poster presentation and our explanation, then showed them some basic experiment operations, like liquid relief, centrifugation and etc. We educated and inspired visitors\' interest by allowing them to observe biochemical-related sections under a laboratory microscope. In addition, we distributed questionnaires to visitors to get their feedback on synthetic biology to improve the design of our software.

Student Open Source Conference

Motivation

The Student Open Source Annual Meeting is the first open source technology summit in China that is organized by student organizations. The main theme of the conference is understanding, participating in, and contributing to open source. The conference was held on Jun 9th and Jun 10th, when our thought had been come up with. So we wanted to introduce our thought, as well as our initial achievements to the participants of open source communities and get suggestions from them. To this end, some members of our team registered and attended this conference.

Practices

At the conference, our leader Wang Hao introduced the iGEM competition, as well as our project - the EDITOR to the audience. Then a member of our team，Chen Lutong, showed the user interface design, functions of the editor and how to achieve them in detail. Finally, the team leader made a summary, listed the advantages of our project, and thought of the future: if there are PHY HUB, CHE HUB, etc., combining them, we will get LAB HUB, which will Facilitate scientific research better.

Integrated into the project

After the conference, we received some feedback from the audience. Based on their suggestions, we made some changes to our project. For example, we decided to change the UI design to improve the user experience. And we wanted to build a community like GitHub, in which synthetic biology researchers can exchange their thoughts, share their experiences, and avoid the mistakes if some researcher has done the experiment before.

Integrated Human Practice

Asia-Pacific Conference in Taiwan

Motivation

We attended the International Genetically Engineered Machine Conference, held by National Chung Hsing University from July 30th to August 3rd, 2018. Over 20 iGEM teams attended the conference and 5 members of our team were sent to Taiwan. We hoped to review our work in a more objective way and learn about projects of other teams.

Practices

During the conference, the iGEMers communicated, exchanged ideas and learned from one another. The conference is not only a simple warm-up for the upcoming world championship in Boston, but an Asian regional platform for teams from different countries to exchange ideas and explore synthetic biology as well. All the teams made a project presentation and introduced their projects. In the poster session, we had many opportunities to communicate with other teams and exchange ideas of our project designs. In this way, we received useful feedback and technology-improvement suggestions from students and professors of other teams.

Integrated into the project

We have learned from other teams that the steps we provided are not enough for them to finish most of the reports. So we designed that users can create new steps and processes. And users can insert texts, pictures, lists, and tables freely in the result section.

Software Promotion

Since our software is an open and fantastic platform with practical functions for synthetic biologists, it’s of great importance to promote our software to synthetic biology related users.

To find out whether our improvement above is useful or not, We packed up an alpha version distributing to schoolmates whose major is biology in September. And in October we packed a more advanced version to some igem teams worldwide. We introduced them to Bioeditor and its basic usage. After they had used this software for a while, most of them reported that it was quite useful. And then we have packed our completed version to the real synthetic biologists by now.