Team:BUCT-China/Education

PublicAccount
OnlinePublicity
“Biodoodle”

Scientific Education

Regarding Scientific Education, we have always adhered to sharing our stories along the way to more people, allowing more people to share our gains, inspiration, touch and joy, and we have also gained this original intention of thinking and feedback from different perspectives. We mainly used the three forms of scientific education: Public account, Online publicity with other team like SCAU-China and BIT-China, and Completion of the coloring book “Biodoodle” for iBowu-China for science popularization.

Ⅰ.Public Account

In order to better spread the knowledge of artificial meat or cell culture meat, we started to use the WeChat public account platform to tweet after social research. The content of the article is mainly about synthetic biology, cell culture, artificial meat cultivation process, etc., which gives the public a systematic and scientific combing of how artificial meat is produced, and answers some questions that we learned from friends’ feedbacks or researches. At the same time, there are corresponding team members for management in the backstage, which is convenient for answering everyone's questions at any time. The team members will also interact and communicate with everyone in the comment area. At present, the official account has published 10 articles in total, including 6 popular science articles, 1 activity report, 1 questionnaire and promotion, 2 invitation letters, and the total number of page views reached 3474 times.

Ⅱ.Online Publicity

Due to the impact of the epidemic, we have held three scientific education activities this year, all of which are live broadcasts to interact with the audiences. As college students, we set the main target of science popularization as peers of similar age, and most of them are college students with diverse backgrounds. The reason for this is because we believe that college students have a certain knowledge base and are therefore more likely to accept new ideas and new things. At the same time, they are also full of passion to learn new things and have passion to change the world, which is more in line with our team spirit. Besides, the multi-disciplinary background of college students (such as the collision of natural sciences and social sciences) prompts us to think about the ethical issues related to cell culture meat, which makes our understanding of the project deeper and has become one of the themes of our subsequent science popularization. College students can give us better feedback and inspiration. Moreover, through the medium of college students, artificial meat related knowledge can also be spread to their parents, elders, and relatives, making it easier for people to accept and understand, and further expand the audiences.

In the first science popularization, we will discuss synthetic biology together with BIT-China and spread some basic knowledge of artificial meat (cell cultured meat). The main audiences are believed to be college students in northern China.

This science popularization activity is divided into four steps, team Premotion Vidio sharing, science education lectures, project introduction and Q&A sessions.

When sharing the lecture, we gave a vivid description of the development process, synthesis process, and comparison of artificial meat with traditional animal husbandry meat and plant-based artificial meat. The concise content of the presentation and the lively and relaxed background painting style deeply attracted the audiences in the live broadcast room.

Afterwards, the student leaders of the two teams gave a detailed introduction of each projects. Not only listeners in live room but also team members from BUCT-China and BIT-China has benefited a lot from the mutual exchange of projects.

At the last Q&A session, everyone actively asked questions and spoke freely. The collision of words and thoughts burst out fierce sparks, benefiting the two teams and the audience a lot and broadening their horizons.

This science popularization is an event jointly held by us and our partner BIT-China, so that both parties have a deeper understanding of each other’s projects; What’s more, the communication with the BIT-China team also started to make us think about how to improve the taste of cultured meat and enrich the relevant product. Therefore, when the project was carried out to the end of the experiment, we conducted the third social survey on consumers’ expectations of cultured meat in the future. Among them, there was a variety of personalized taste customization options (this is the same as the BIT-China project) The survey shows that about 59% of consumers hope that cultured meat can have a variety of personalized tastes in the future. The relevant data are as follow:

The second session, together with SCAU-China and FAFU-China, conducted a joint presentation of the three schools "under the micro, above life". We shared our knowledge about cultured meat and our deeper understanding than the first scientific education. When the understanding is spread, the audiences are more biased towards college students in southern China. The highest number of viewers reached 251, and the audiences were also actively discussing in the comment area.

In the third science popularization, due to the in-depth experimentation, our understanding of artificial meat (cell-cultured meat) was further deepened. Due to the feedback from the audiences during the popularization of synthetic biology, we also had a deeper thinking on the hot topics of this era. Therefore, with several teams that BIT -China, BIT, and iBowu-China jointly organized a seminar on synthetic biology ethics. The preaching format is: BIT and BIT-China preached offline, and BUCT-China and iBowu-China preached online together.

The presentation includes four processes:
    iBowu-China explains what biological ethics is by using examples
    BUCT-China briefly introduces the project + cultured meat ethics
    BIT-China briefly introduces the project + artificial life ethics
    BIT brief introduction of project + biomedical ethics

After investigation and literature review, we found that everyone's attention to the ethical issues of artificial meat is mainly focused on four points. First is the aspect of food safety: people who do not know much about biology will think that artificial meat is not "natural" enough, and people who have certain biological knowledge are worry about whether unhealthy factors will be introduced in the cell cultured process; the second is to doubt the value and significance of cultured meat, thinking that China has a relatively developed aquaculture industry, there is no need to invest a lot of time and money to research and develop such a problem. Something that is too reliable; third, it is worried that the development of artificial meat will have certain impacts on society, which may have a negative impact or impact on traditional meat-related industries such as traditional husbandry and affect traditional food culture. At last, from the animal's point of view that cultured meat makes people rethink about the relationship between humans and animals.

We found that many concerns and thoughts about the ethical issues of cultured meat stem from the fact that people do not have a comprehensive understanding of the entire production process of cultured meat. In fact, it also shows that in many cases we lack a prerequisite combing and scientific foundation of science to the public. Therefore, we first briefly explained the production process and source of cultured meat, and then discussed more valuable ethical issues of cultured meat with the participants.

Ⅲ. Coloring book “Biodoodle”

The communication with iBowu-China allowed us to aware importance of children’s science popularization. In order to cultivate children’s interest in synthetic biology, and to convey the joy we have gained during the project, we have drawn our project as linear drawings. Submit the form to ibowu-China to complete the writing of “Biodoodle”