Team:NCKU Tainan/Education
Overview
Since our target this year is mild stress-induced depression, we want to deliver our idea amidst this pandemic outbreak to the world. We believe communication should be two-ways, hence we do not only deliver, but also listen to feedback from the public. Engaging with diverse groups helps us mature our project and understand exactly where the current issues lie. In return, we provide educational content to the public ranging from synthetic biology to mental health issues. Synthetic biology itself is still a controversial topic among society, unfortunately. Our team is currently working on a challenging topic that revolves around heavy stigmas with a controversial method which makes it so much difficult to gain support from the public. Thus, our main objective is to eradicate the misconceptions surfacing in the community.
We have come up with various ways to achieve our objective. For better efficacy, we divided some of the educational contents based on the level of understanding, from elementary level to university level. But most of them should still be understood by the public. Due to the pandemic, most of our content was delivered through online platforms. We also organized a special event along with a long-term online exhibition in Gather Town. Scroll down to find out more about what we have done so far!
Engagement
Education
2020 NCKU iGEM Special Project
2021.02.27
NCKU Bike Festival
Open house event of National Cheng Kung University to increase exposure of iGEM and also synthetic biology.
2021.03.04~05
Club Festival
Promoted iGEM NCKU to college students and explained why we are using synthetic biology to solve problems and our vision for our projects.
2021.03.31
iGEM Topic Presentation
Presented our 3 potential research topics to gain feedbacks and advices from professors and other students.
2021.04.12
President Meetup
Met up with the President of NCKU to talk about our experiences and shared why we wanted to join iGEM in the first place.
2021.05.01~30
Podcast
Podcast to stimulate the sense of hearing.
2021.05.21~30
Booklet
Helped students to realize the potential for future biological and engineering development.
Promoted our project through newspapers to allow more people to understand the importance of our project.
Met up with College X to facilitate future cooperation and talk about how we are able to promote interdisciplinary research.
Invited to a radio interview to talk about our project and promote the issue of chronic kidney disease.
2021.07.03
Taiwan Conference
Participated in the Taiwan conference and exchange ideas with other iGEMers who gave our team different feedbacks and guidance.
2021.09.04
Gather Town
Held an Escape Room that mirrors our project where players of all ages and backgrounds are able to learn through an interactive and hands-on experience.
Engagement
As for the engagement part, it is regarded as an important bridge for us to connect the science technology and the world. Not only did we target a delivery of the values of synthetic biology to the society in this part, we also attempted to explore a more profound impacts and practical application of our lab research. So far, we had developed strong and successive connections of different universities, and what’s more, we attempted to build a close contact with the local synthetic biology enterprise. During the pandemic, we adapted ourselves to utilize different methods to complete our project. Through various platforms of online meeting, we effectively promoted our project to the public and sought for a higher reach of public concerns with the depression issues and the synthetic biology application in the society.
NCKU Bike Festival
NCKU Bike Festival is an open house event held by National Cheng Kung for the public, mainly high school students, to inquire about majors and organizations available in NCKU. We were very enthusiastic about this festival because it is the first event we participated officially as a team. Our objective was introducing synthetic biology to high school and university students in Taiwan. To let them have better understanding we utilized Lego parts as BioBricks. We explained about synthetic biology and BioBricks to them beforehand, then asked them to assemble a BioBrick using Lego parts according to their functions. Other than that, we also built an E. coli costume to attract more visitors and held a mini game where the participants were allowed to trap the E. coli using a Hula Hoops which represented a plasmid. This method turned out to be successful in attracting visitors to our booth! As expected, most of them never heard of iGEM nor synthetic biology before coming to our booth. But after our explanation, they finally knew about this subject and even gave us some ideas for our project.
iGEM Topic Presentation
After each individuals’ brainstorming session, we were divided into three sub-teams with our topic choices this year. Our team invited audiences from different fields to take part in our topic selection. We believe gaining feedback from various perspectives allows us to recognize the shortcoming of the topic candidates. It also provides us with vulnerable insights that we can take into account when deciding the final topic. Each sub-team was required to conduct a 20 minutes presentation and 10 minutes Q&A session with the audiences. We adopted the voting system for final topic selection and that is how MenTAUR was born.
NCKU Club Festival
National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) holds a club festival every semester to introduce all clubs to the freshmen students. We took the chance and participated in the festival to promote our upcoming topic presentation and invite as many people as possible. But we had to explain synthetic biology to most people at first because it is not well-known among the students. Although we had a fixed booth, we chose to walk around and engage with more people. We even shared with other clubs about synthetic biology and our vision. People seemed interested in our project and gave us a lot of encouraging support.
Taiwan Conference
Due to the pandemic, the conference with other Taiwan iGEM teams had to be online via Microsoft Teams. We appreciate iGEM NTHU for hosting the conference, as well as other teams that participated in it. Each team was required to present their project for around 20 minutes before entering the Q&A session. Through the discussion, we could think more critically about the blind spots in our project, we also exchanged ideas about possible collaborations. Thanks to this conference, we were able to meet iGEM CCU and formed a partnership with them.
NCKU President Meetup
In April 2021, we had lunch with the President of National Cheng Kung University, Dr. Huey-Jen Jenny Su. The president has been rooting for iGEM NCKU_Tainan since 2016, we thank her support. While having lunch, we filled in more details to President Su about our project this year. She provided many suggestions for us to improve the project. Other than that, she also asked about the reason we join iGEM and our goals to remind us this journey is not going to be an easy one, but we need to keep moving on.
Education
From our previous engagements, we began to realize that society, especially the older generations, tend to think twice when it comes to synthetic biology and gene editing. The many misconceptions and myths surrounding science is proof that not a lot of people understand it. And with lack of knowledge, fear and rejection also come along. In an effort to prevent this negative cycle from repeating, we decided to start from the beginning - by educating the new generation. We hoped by challenging their thoughts and encouraging them to begin thinking outside the box, they are able to break away from this negative cycle and drive a positive change in the future. To quote Oprah Winfrey, “Education is the way to move mountains, to build bridges, to change the world.”
Podcast
At first, we were thinking about how to promote our content to the public in this pandemic. Then, we came up with the idea to own a podcast channel called Tea Time (聊鬱) where we talk about various subjects but still within synthetic biology and mental health issue. We have also invited the 2019 iGEM NCKU_Tainan leader, Sabrina Yeoh, as our first episode’s guest speaker sharing her experiences in iGEM. Other than that, we wanted to raise mental awareness and provided some content talking about mild depression. The language switched between English and Chinese. Try listening to our podcast by clicking the link below!
Booklet
The number of people moving to Taiwan is increasing over the years. One of the common groups is probably international students. Being far away from somewhere familiar must be hard for most of them. Not to mention the cultural difference and language barrier often cause difficulties making it harder to adapt. Under this kind of situation, their mental health tends to be more vulnerable. But it might be hard for them to gain mental resources because, honestly, Taiwan doesn't offer many mental resources. Thus, we created this booklet for foreign nationals in Taiwan. The content is about how they can seek mental help in Taiwan, we also included resources that provide English service. Furthermore, it is available in three languages: English, Chinese, and Indonesian. We have distributed the booklet in the dormitory, international student office, and overseas Chinese student office.
Momentizing
In a heavily tech-focused world, it is an undeniable fact that the internet plays an important role in people’s lives and that most people cannot resist a good online game. With this in mind, we designed a simple snake game, a classic game that appeals to all kinds of players. Not only will the game provide entertainment but also education - edutainment if you will. By combining education with entertainment, we are able to make learning more fun for everyone.
Developed by our dry team, OMG Snake Game is inspired by our project. Just like CreSolve is targeted at p-Cresol, so does the snake. The snake represents Cresolve, and can only eat blocks of p-Cresol. Through this simple logic, we are able to help people of all backgrounds understand the main idea of our project.
