Team:ZJU-China/Public Engagement

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PUBLIC 
ENGAGEMENT 


Techfest


• Achievement: a public education involving 5 igem teams and more than 1000 participants!


“Be a world shaper!” Stimulating interests of the youth to be future world shaper is a core purpose of our education part in Human Practice. Every year ZJU-iGEM holds Techfest in Zhejiang Technology and Science museum since 2015. Particularly in this year, we invited ZJUT-China, JNU-China, ASTWS-China, HFLS_ZhejiangUnited and Worldshaper-XSHS to co-organize the Techfest.


We always believe education should be directly applied on students in each age group, including from kids in primary school to youth in collage. Always, popularization of science activity is considered as the bridge to link the profound science and the public together. We designed several minigames such as Candy DNA Model Splicing, Ecological Bottle Designing, Card Game on How to Splice Genetic Circuit Correctly.



Kids had shown great interests in our minigames and we took this advantage to advertise what is modern biology. Children were enjoying our well-designed minigames and we were really happy that public showed such great enthusiasm on biology. In order to make our activity more impressive and more in-depth, we designed 100 total simple questions related with synthetic biology after kids having fun with our minigames. We were so delighted!


Questionaries


Techfest attracted hundreds of parents and children to join in. Meanwhile, to investigate the public concerns about the cell-containing diagnosis system and cell-free systems from adults, we conducted a questionnaire survey.

One youth talk


• Achievements: what is iGEM and who is ZJU-iGEM



Time 2018.6.18


OneYouthTalk is a speech conference for undergraduates to talk and share their diverting but serious and helpful ideas.


OneYouthTalk x ZJU-iGEM is also an unexpectedly magical interaction! We gave a speech on what is iGEM and who is ZJU-iGEM and had profound discussion about several issues in synthetic biology.


Synthetic Biology, comes with creativity, curiosity, crossed interdisciplinary, will be the next revolution for the whole human beings. DNA computing, a totally different way to think out of the ‘silicon’ box, will be probably the next information computing wave! Artificial Life, cloning of animals Dolly in 1996, though far not applicable, still a brand fancy way to explore this unknown world! Human Genome Project, the post-genome project is on the road, a brand-new age is coming to us! How exciting we are to explore the rest of our world, to know the unknown future!


As iGEMers, we also discussed when immigrating to Mars how to live and settle down as a synthetic biologist instead of a botanist. (See ‘S P A C E’, How to colonize Mars, Brown-Stanford 2011)


We also concerned about the freshness of our fruit (See ‘FRES(H)’, Fruit Ripeness Ethylene Sensor (Hopefully), USYD-2016). iGEM projects were and are making unprecedented possibilities to give out solutions aiming to different fields of dilemma. Combined with Synthetic Biology, ZJU-iGEM delivers the principle of biological and ethical criterion of iGEM competition to our publics through OneYouthTalk. The considerations of biosafety and public engagement also invisibly lead our team to step further in our next science popularization activity!


See our Techfest in Zhejiang Technology and Science Museum!


Thanks for the active participants, we were really encouraged and will definitely do this again in the next year!