Team:NUDT CHINA/Education
Education
After investigation, we think that many students have little knowledge about synthetic biology. Therefore, we decided to hold lectures about synthetic biology for senior high school students and college students, and distribute publicity materials about the subject, which could help more students learn about synthetic biology and stimulate their curiosity about it. Besides, We also investigated the effect of lectures and the expectations of the listeners by sending out questionnaires. These activities were also benefical for our project to be applied better in the future.
Through our preliminary research, we learned that the public believes that our project is most likely to be applied in medical field (Click here for details,Please find "Pre-Research questionnaire" and click it) .With the help of the Science Popularization Education Association of Southern Medical University (SMU), we had the opportunity to conduct a popular science lecture in SMU. In this lecture, every audience was medical student. They are potential users of our project. Because they had learned some knowledge about biology, they could understood synthetic biology and our project better than the general public.
Before the lecture, we delivered an online questionnaire to students of Southern Medical University to learn about students' understanding of synthetic biology, iGEM competitions and the use of technologies in projects. We found that only 33.96% of these medical students surveyed knew the concept of synthetic biology and only 18.87% of the them learned about what iGEM is. This proves the necessity of our education.
On the lecture, Members of our HP group introduced some knowledge about type 2 diabetes to students through pancreatic duct casting models and digital human technology. After that, we talked about our 2019 project, a modified system that regulates blood glucose through the predator system and may be applied to the treatment of type 2 diabetes to help students change from the study of medicine to the study of synthetic biology.
Besides, we introduced some basic knowledge of synthetic biology to the students, and briefly introduced the iGEM competition. We also introduced the application of synthetic biology in medicine to the students. Finally, we gave these students a simple science popularization of our project.
After the lecture, We sent out another questionnaire to our audience after lecture.Most of audiences thought that their understanding of the concepts involved in synthetic biology and experiments had been improved to some extent or greatly and hoped to continue to understand synthetic biology or apply their knowledge to their work in the future, which shows that our preaching has indeed improved the awareness of the vast majority of listeners to synthetic biology and iGEM, and increased these students' acceptance and interest in learning synthetic biology.
The audiences suggested that we should study the application of our project in the pharmaceutical field and tumor treatment, which was of great help to us in determining the direction of future work in experiment.
Lecture in Southern Medical University was mainly focused on the education of the project, and the public's awareness as well as understanding were raised. Also enthusiasm for related research was deepened through the publicity. According to the questionnaire surveys before and after the lecture in Southern Medical University, we made appropriate adjustments to the content of the science education, and designed the content of the questionnaire and popular science exchange links that were more suitable for high school students, thus launching the lecture in Changjun Middle School on the morning of October 8. This presentation not only belongs to the scope of science popularization and communication, but also one of the key projects of the partnership with CSU_CHINA. During the lecture, members of NUDT_CHINA and CSU_CHINA introduced the basic concepts and application prospects of synthetic biology to middle school students through micro-classes. The animation used was mainly made by NUDT_CHINA.
In order to deepen middle school students' understanding of practical projects based on synthetic biology and help them further understand the social benefits of our projects, we introduced the projects of NUDT_CHINA and CSU_CHINA in an accessible way, and focused on the common aspects of the two projects.
We took middle school students as the main body and led them to brainstorm on the theme -- if you are an expert in synthetic biology, what project do you want to design synthetically. We also encouraged them to speak freely and associate synthetic biology with high school biology. After that, we shared their views on the iGEM competition and why we liked it.
In order to test the specific effect of the presentation and understand the high school students' understanding of synthetic biology and our projects after the lecture, we conducted a questionnaire survey for middle school students. The questionnaire was mainly created by CSU_CHINA, and printed by NUDT_CHINA.
The results of this questionnaire are as follows:
From the bars drawn according to statistics, we can learn that high students mainly concern about the security, ethnic issues and premature technique of the synthetic biology. And 24.6% of them take much interest in gene, ranking the top. We iGEMers should attach more importance to the security and collects sufficient evidence of our project. Most importantly, 80.8% gave positive feedback to our education and had much more understanding of protein degradation, the core of our project. Through this presentation, we helped middle school students understand synthetic biology, provided a perspective on synthetic biology, cultivated an interest in the career of synthetic biology, and thus escaped the framework of exam-oriented education, providing a broader vision and more opportunity for in-depth thinking. We have promoted synthetic biology and our projects from professional medical students to a broader group--middle school students, thus achieving the purpose of education and popular science.
After the secondary online meeting with FZU, in order to increase the publicity scope of the two teams' projects, we decided to make a kind of popular science publicity manual with the materials of the two teams in the cell factory picture books. Members of our art groups learned from each other's experience and jointly made this manual. Then, FZU_CHINA delivered manuals to primary and secondary school students in Fuzhou with the help of Fujian Science Popularization Education Association (Click here for details) while with the help of SMU Science Popularization Education Association,on Oct 17th, we distributed manuals in the Human Science Museum of SMU. In addition, we also distributed the "skin alliance" mammals to visiting citizens.People were very interested in these beautiful publicity materials.Many citizens also asked our team members some questions. Collaborations
