As we are conducting our project, we come across the issue that there is an underrepresentation of China's western region and the old and the young group in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) field, so we make up our mind to promote synthetic biology and the background knowledge relevant to our project to them. For the sake of expanding access to synthetic biology and/or science more broadly and break the boundaries of region and age, we delivered lectures and collaborated on writing the 2021 Intestinal Program Reference Manual for reference by other teams. In a word, we are hoping to create an inclusive environment for the world.
Team:Nanjing-China/Inclusivity
Delivering Lecture
The western regions of China are home to a large number of ethnic minorities as well as places with the coexistence of many cultures. The implementation of basic education in the western minority regions is an important part of China's education reform and development and is related to the social stability and long-term development of China's minority regions. However, while promoting our project, we learned that there are problems like a shortage of biology teachers in the western regions of China. In order to bring knowledge about synthetic biology and our project to local middle school students and to promote the IGEM competition to them, we cooperated with members of the Nanjing University Teaching Assistance Group to deliver lectures to Yunnan and Guizhou (the western regions of China) through online classes and video recordings.
Apart from people in the less educated regions, children and the elderly are also groups that can be overlooked in everyday science education. Thanks to the residential communities that surround our schools, we have taken the opportunity to redesign our curriculum based on the comprehension of the elderly and children, and have gone into the communities to bring lively classes to them. In addition, we have also used the Teaching Assistance Group to run online classes in a community in Yunnan, aiming to expand the audience for our courses and give older people the opportunity to learn about advanced synthetic biology. In addition, we actively communicate with the elderly after each activity, hoping to answer their questions from our expertise and bring more meaning and value to the public through our project.
Outreach
Children are able to broaden their understanding and develop an interest in biology through innovative projects. Twenty children from Yaoan Village, with an average age of seven, took part in our project named 'Drawing animal cartoon fans'. We hope that this activity could serve as an inspiration to the children in their childhood, encouraging them to draw their own understanding of living things through color and to express it artistically. We received comments such as "science is fun" and "I hope to learn more about animals in the future" during the painting session. We were very happy and proud to see the fans of artwork created by the children and the smiles on their faces when they were drawing their cartoon patterns.
Redacting the Intestinal Program Reference Manual
As the Intestinal Program is related to disease, safety and ethics are our priority. In order to provide a guidebook for future teams to follow, we cooperated with six other teams to sign the 2021 Intestinal Program Reference Manual, of which we were responsible for writing the ethics and safety sections.
