Publicity on Campus Open Day
In May 2018, on the campus open day of Dalian University of Technology, the DLUT_CHINA_B team carried out a series of activities to expand the influence of synthetic biology and iGEM competition at Dalian University of Technology. We designed the “Prize-giving Quiz” game to give the guests a general knowledge of biology. “Understanding Micro-World Activities” provides visitors with microscopes and some samples made by the team members which let them to observe and understand the microbes we can't see. This part attracted many primary and middle school students. We also distributed more than 300 survey questionnaires. These questionnaires were mainly designed for people of different ages to understand their physical condition and for understanding the market demand of our product. The results showed that a lot of people are interested in our program which made the team members more motivated.
Lead Synthetic Biology Into the Campus
In order to propaganda synthetic biology knowledge to primary and secondary schools more vividly in Dalian, our decided to work with OUC-CHINA. Their team members will design synthetic biology science brochures and we would made into a poster. The poster will be displayed together with the posters of DLUT_CHINA_B in several primary and secondary schools in Dalian as well as the libraries of Dalian University of Technology. The OUC-CHINA team's popular science brochure is called SPACESHIP E.coli, which compares E. coli to a spaceship, anthropomorphizing the ribosome, and describing the logic switches and biological components in synthetic biology vividly. We hope that more primary and middle school students will grow a great interest in synthetic biology through the activities.
In these promotions, we also found that some of the high school attached great importance to this competition. High School affiliated to Dalian University of Technology is one of them.
Three members of our team came to the High School affiliated to Dalian University of Technology. After the team members explained the principle of synthetic biology, many students have shown a great interest in synthetic biology. We learned that the Dalian High School affiliated to the Dalian University of Technology had also established the iGEM Student Association during the communication. This communication also provided some new ideas for the students of the iGEM association, which broadened their horizons and inspire them to learn more about synthetic biology.
We hoped that our iGEM publicity trip would arouse the students’ interest in synthetic biology and contribute to the development of the iGEM competition in China.
