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Human Practice

Public Engagement

       To shoulder our obligations to the Syn-bio community and the entire society. We carried out a series of
       activities to draw public attention and introduce this field to them. The audience includes general public and
       potential synthetic biologists, the high school students.

WeChat Public Account

       We established a wechat public account and posed introduction of Syn-Bio on it. Our account home page includes
       columns as "Mr.Syn", "global challenges" and "have fun together". In the first column, we posted introduction
       of synthetic biology, iGEM competition, and our team. In the second sector, we put forward 5 main challenges
       that the human race face today and tried to solve it with Synthetic biology. We interviewed one professor at
       Sun-Yat sen university for each challenge to learn more about the issues. Then we posted our Syn-Bio solution
       to this problem. we also encourage the readers to think out of the box so we had the global challenge as our
       special topic. In the third sector we posted our Jump-Jump game to introduce the Syn-Bio principles in an
       interesting form.

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Figure 9: WeChat Public Account

High school mini lectures

       We prepared small brochures about Syn-Bio to introduce the concept and principle, we also attached the model
       organism: Arabidopsis seed to stimulate interest. The QR code leading to our public account is also printed on
       the brochure so the high school students can follow us easier. Then we went to two high schools at Guangzhou
       and Shenzhen to give introduction of Syn-Bio and had a Q&A session to help them better understand this concept
       and help us learn about their needs. It turned out to be a success that the students have gain basic
       understanding about the SYN-BIO subject and some of the students got in touch with us by the public account.

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figure 10: Introduce synbiology to high school students

Biology Festival

       The school of life sciences at Sun Yat-Sen University holds biology carnival open to the public annually. This
       year, we had a stand at the carnival, whose theme is Syn-Bio basic and global challenges.. The theme was
       designed to let the audience learn about the basic Syn-Bio concepts and principles as well as think in an
       interdisciplinary way. The audience could talk with us about their outlook of the five global challenges and
       their understandings of Syn-Bio. The engineering principle and standardized Syn-Bio characteristic was
       introduced with a standardized electronic circuit building toy. People from different backgrounds came to our
       stand and exchanged their opinions with us. This activity enhanced our communication with the general public,
       we learnt more about the public’s understandings and views of this subject and the public learnt more about our
       subject and a new science and technology.

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Figure 11: Popularize knowledge of synbiology to public

Game promotion

       In the process of talking with public people, we find it is hard to explain concept of synthetic biology and
       popularize knowledge to them. We think synthetic biology can also be funny and easy to get close to ordinary
       people. In this case, our team design a game "Little tomato with big dreams". By help our little tomato grow
       up, players can learn principle and basic knowledge of synthetic biology.

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Figure 12: Mini game - Little tomato with big dreams