Difference between revisions of "Team:SJTU-software/Public Engagement"

This game is basically a maze and mainly contains five parts: glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, fatty acid metabolism, biosynthesis of steroid and urea cycle. You can choose different path at nodes(middle metabolites) by clicking on different walls, where the requirement of each path will be shown. The wall will turn red if you don't meet the requirement. ATP is the "currency" in the game and will decline as time goes by. The game fails when ATP drops to zero, so try to make the right choice and survive. It can also be used to exchange some important middle metabolites. You can always check the remaining time as well as your current major metabolite in the top left corner of your version while the repository sysmtem is in the top right corner. We provide both Engish and Chinese version of this game.

On Sept. 16th, we came to Youth Center of Minhang District with our ‘Met Journey’, to introduce metabolism and synthetic biology. First, we explained about the metabolic system in the human body to them, leading them to recognize the importance of metabolism. Then we introduced our game, ‘Met Journey’ and taught them to play the game. They were all very interested with the game. At first, they were not so familiar with the system, so they failed once and again. As they became more familiar, they could complete the system, and had fun in the process of exploring. With the fun of playing the game, they realized the complexity of metabolic system. Then we introduced synthetic biology to them, explaining the close relationship between synthetic biology and our daily life. We were all proud to see their interests in synthetic biology were aroused.

SJTUer’s festival is an annual Youth creative carnival in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In 2018 SJTUer’s festival, we set up a booth in section of Science and technology to provide public with scientific biology knowledge and promoting their scientific literacy.

We demonstrated the public how to use a microscope and stereoscope. From Moss slice，blood cell to petal, ant…… Everyone have enjoyed the wonder of microworld. Especially, the activity attracted many children and stimulated them the exploration of the biological world!

We also provided public a chance to build DNA models with their own hands. In this DIY process, everyone not only feel the sense of accomplishment of building a model by hand, but also increased the knowledge. They were impressed with the structure of double stranded DNA and understood the mysteries of molecular biology.

We gave a brief introduction of synthetic biology to public, then we encouraged them write down their hope for the future development of synthetic biology. Someone wrote” I hope synthetic biology can help cure for cancer in the future.” Another wrote” I hope synthetic biology can play a role in promoting plant growth and raising the yield of crops.’’…… We were greatly inspired by these public opinions.

During the summer vacation, we took advantage of the experiment center for life-science teaching and conducted a series of basic experiments facing to the middle school students nationwide. These experiments including the identification of GM foods were aimed at giving students a better understanding of genes and life science. We hope we could intrigue their interest in life science and make them be devoted in synthetic biology in the near feature.

In desire of raising more students and faculty’s awareness of synthetic biology and IGEM, our team elaborately prepared a presentation on October 10th, the college open day. We introduced the iGEM competition, 2017&2018’s projects of our team, as well as the status quo and prospect of synthetic biology to the freshmen in SJTU. They showed great interest in iGEM and the projects we did, and some of them even showed willingness to join us someday.