Team:Tianjin/Public Engagement
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Education and Public Engagement
We advocate more and more people approaching deep into the world of synthetic biology. Through editing a picture book for children, called ‘The adventure of Xinye’, we taught interesting stories based on advanced synthetic biological technologies to children and show them how the technologies have changed our daily life. Moreover, as the core promoter of public engagement, we arranged a serious of activities to enlarge our influence and spread iGEM idea to every age group. Thus, we not only performed a TV show for children but volunteered to teach public courses of synthetic biology for teenagers in Tianjin SOS Children Center as well. We also developed good relationship with high school teachers and invited senior students to visit our lab on Open-Up day, which help students gain better understanding of the knowledge they learn in biology classes. The Synthetic biology can be a popular science by our effort.
Approaching iGEM on Malus spectabilis Festival
Malus spectablils is the symbol flower of Tianjin University and every Spring,the Malus spectabilis festival is a grand party on campus. Every year, thousands of citizens visit the campus to appreciate the lovely fowers. In the meatime, it is also a good time for diverse student organization to display their extrodinary achievement to the public. We set up our stall early in the morning, exhibited the poster, held little games spreading knowledge of synthetic biology and do experimental performances. With adequate preparation, we attract batches of people to our stall.
However, during the event, we found that public understanding of biotechnology stay in traditional plant and animal cells in biology books. Others also complained that advanced concept of synthetic biology seems to be far from reality, which gives a signal that synthetic biology should be more accessible and popular science by our endeavors.
A picture book for children
Aimed at making synthetic biology easier to understand for ordinary people, we decided to write a serious of popular science stories based on advanced synthetic biological technology as well as previous successful iGEM pregram, and adjusted them in a proper form suitable for children. In our stories, we set a protagonist named XinYe, who is a gifted boy studying in a biology lab with Professor Yingjin Yuan, School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University. The mainline of the book is the adventure of XinYe recording how he helps various microorganisms to solve problems using the knowledge of synthetic biology. Many cartoon figures was added to attract young readers and help them understand the biological principle.
It’s worth mentioning that our book is sponsored by the National Ministry of science and Technology and will be published around the world by the middle of October. It is the first popular science book about synthetic biology published for children in China.
Furthermore, we plan to expand the reading target of our books by writing a more professional synthetic biological book for teenagers in middle school and high school. By now, we have finished the first draft and the book is planed to be published by November
A TV program for children
To give the children a more vivid experience of exploring synthetic biology, we organized a TV show broadcast on Tianjin TV station. On September 23th, we invited over 20 families to our lab. After teaching them some basic knowledge of microorganism and introducing our project “Life Tik Tok” about biological clock, each kid did a simple biology experiment with our safety guardance, such as observing the specimen by microscope, running the DNA electrophoresis, etc. During this happy period, bursts of laughter kept floating out of our lab and all the kids showed great curiosity about the new microorganism world. Meanwhile we discussed the picture book with their parents. They gave us much advice on how to make the book more accessible for kids. After the activity, the record was programmed by the TV station and broadcast circularly.
Interaction with local high schools
We visited many local high schools and stay connected with biology teachers. Some of them welcome us to do experiments for the students. We focus on building bridge between high school biology text book and advanced synthetic biology. For that, we prepared a detailed schedule contain: gene manipulation technique, the concept of synthetic biology and its application in reality, introduction of iGEM project, example of our program. To our surprise, we received countless fans of synthetic biology and decided to open up our laboratory to the students.
Therefore, on Summer vocation, we held an laboratory open-up event for local high school students. In our lab, we operated experimental apparatus to them and explained how to do a well-designed experiment following certain protocol. Meanwhile, we also taught them several experiment skills and safety issues that need to pay attention. Eventually, we shared our acadamic experience about studying synthetic biology and participating iGEM competition. Our effort were deeply apreciated by their high school biology teachers.
Volunteer Course in Tianjin SOS Children Village
In a sunny day of October 2, we went to the Tianjin SOS Children Village which is the largest international children village in China. We have reached an agreement with teachers and volunteered to have a series of synthetic biology class for the children regularly. In our first course, we brought the newly-published picture book. The children in the village expressed huge interest in the colourful pictures and kept asking us questions about books. Through communicating with them wholeheartedly, we found that as an iGEMer it is our responsibility to not only spread knowledge to those children, but show them the spirit of exploring new science. Although synthetic biology is a abstruse concept for children, they began to understand modern biology technology is making a difference in the real life and many said ‘they want to be biology scientists in the future!
Integrated HP
The idea of our project was originated from the Nobel Price in Medicine in 2017. We first conducted a survey about how the living patterns (especially sleep) can influnce people’s life and the public expectation for biological techiques to change the situation. Through our effort, we find the KaiABC system can periodically regulate gene expression in other species. Since our project is a fundamental research, we have cooperated with six universities to do research on the transformation model of biotechnology achievements, seeking to find proper application. During the investigation, we made a technical evaluation of the project results and conducted market analysis for the subsequent periodic expression products. We also visited Institute of Industrial Biotechnology to seek advice from experts and learn the procedure of industry-university-research cooperation. According to the investigation, we have revised project design and descied the application of our project.