Team:GreatBay SZ/Education
Education
GreatBay_SZ has always been devoted to cover all ages of teenagers to spread knowledge and spur their interest in learning synthetic biology – not only did we posed lectures and conduct experiments with our peers to inform them, more importantly, we used our resources to help younger kids as well, dedicating to raise their awareness of this fascinating subject as soon as possible.
To start, we conducted lectures about synthetic biology at the Bluepha company and online, while also introducing our project to high school students and university students. To extend our influence and keep reminding people of the latest news in synthetic biology, we build a group chat consisting of people interested in synthetic biology, and regularly post interesting synthetic biology news within the group. The result was apparent, with people discussing questions with us even months after the lecture.
Synthetic Biology Lecture
Our project has done a great deal to engage annual groups and individuals in a wide range of fields. Through these participation programs, we made our iGEM programs known to more people, beyond gender, religion, age, social class and race. We have designed fun activities for people of all ages, for all who are interested in synthetic biology. First of all, we conducted a synthetic biology lecture for people who are interested in this particular field. During the lecture, we introduced the basic theory and ethics of synthetic biology. We also talked about the well-known applications of synthetic biology like Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Immunotherapy, Repressilator and protein design etc. In total, about 40 people of all ages and countries attended our lecture. As reflected from them, they showed great interest in synthetic biology and expressed intentions to explore more in this area. This lecture also helped them correct their understanding of synthetic biology as he said: " Never had I notice so many things worked around my life is the result of synthetic biology. "
Our Official WeChat Account
To understand our audience 's needs and answer their questions, we set up our social media account. We kept on posting essays about technical expertise such as Crispr cas12a that was used in our project. Besides technology, we also introduced traditional paintings and traditional seals to inform people of the importance and amazement of our own culture. According to the backend data, we get hundreds of views in every post, we carried forward the spirit our project wanted to deliver about our culture: to respect it with appreciation, spread it with confidence, and promote it even with our trifling services.
Education for Girls
Apart from that, we also conducted a lecture which is more professional and directed to the technology used in our project in an ECA(Extra-Curricular activities) called Science Education for Girls in SCIE. In this lecture, we specifically talked about SHERLOCK, Cas12a and Cas9 mechanisms, we also went through their differences and advantages with out audiences. At the end of lecture, we introduced our own iGEM project as well. Viewing our project from a beholder's perspective, we gained a lot of useful advice from our peers. For example, one of our audience gave us suggestions about how to deal with the spores we produced and the detection method we used. After discussing with our team members and wisely selected their opinions, we made corresponding improvements to our project such as deciding to use Cas12a testing system. Despite holding talks introducing iGEM and our project, we also had in-depth conversations with the audience -- from our peers interested in authenticity identification to university students who wanted to hear about the younger generation’s ideas and innovations. We taught them delightfully to help the others with what we have learned; they responded with hope – hope to study our field in the future.
We all agreed that this lecture was meaningful and helpful. One of our audience who participated in this lecture told us that she learnt something beyond class which she became really interested in. As a result, she may also decide to take synthetic biology as her major in the future.
Synthetic Biology Education For Children
Furthermore, we have also introduced synthetic biology primary school children, we specifically used simpler terms to substitute some complicated technical words and they seemed to enjoy the presentation a lot . Considering their young age, instead of lecturing them on professional biology knowledge, we conduct basic operations such as collecting microbiological specimens and using a microscope, aiming to spur their interest in molecular biology experiments. Combining our own project, we also introduced what we have been doing and surprisingly found out their interest in it. We were astonished and gratified by the enthusiasm that grew inside them.
