Team:OUC-China/Education
Popular Science Articles
Our questionnaire includes some antibiotic related questions, such as distinguishing the antibiotic based drugs with other drugs. After distributing the questionnaires, we received the feedback that the respondents generally consider they received inadequate knowledge of antibiotic and popular science articles is one of a welcoming way for science popularization. We also received some comments from the respondents that they really wanted to know the correct answers of the questionnaire. Then we decided to write a popular science article to respond to our lovely respondents who are willing to equip more science knowledge. We also wanted to explore diverse ways of science education for different people have various habits of knowledge learning.
At the end of may, 2021, DUT-China was the only iGEM team we knew who also worked on new pollutants related projects. We then decided to work together to publish an new pollutants related popular science article to introduce the concepts of new pollutants to public, and provide some instruction for them to protect the environment as well as themselves.
Comic Series
Our vision of continuously creating our original comic series is to introduce science in a lively and interesting way. The feedback of our questionnaire also supported our idea that it showed comic is one of the most welcomed form of science popularization(See more Detail in our Questionnaire section). What we didn’t expected was that when we mentioned our original comic series to the teachers in Lvchun middle school, where we conducted online lectures(See more detail on our Online Course for Children in Poor and Remote Region section), they showed great interests on it. And they gave as the idea of printing all of our already created comics into little books and mail to them, so that they can put them on the local school’s library for public reading. We loved this idea and finally realized it.
This year, we created 3 new chapters for our comic series: E.coli Spaceship. On May 8th,2021, we published our first new chapter introducing Quorum Sensing which is the of of the most significant and well-studied communication mechanism of bacteria. In this chapter, we mentioned the discovery of QS and elaborated its genetic coded mechanism of population controlling.
We then decided to print our comic series into physical books. Since our targeted audiences are pupils, but the concepts such as RNA, ribosome are generally be learned on high school, thus might be too difficult to those students. We then decided to add a opening chapter introducing the basic elements to be mentioned on the later chapters. We believe that a comic based central dogma is much more vivid and understandable comparing text book. We are glad to introduce this cornerstone of life science to the children who have interests on life science.
We then extended our comic books taking advantage of the collaboration with LZU-CHINA. Since both of our team’ project involve CRISPR/Cas system, we decided to create a new chapter introducing this powerful and famous immune system of bacteria. OUC-China wrote the script, LZU-CHINA drew the comic(See more detail on our collaboration page).
Lab Tour
Taking the advantage of the summer camp Ocean University of China organized for the high school students from all over China, we invited them to have an offline lab tour in our iGEM lab. We showed them around the lab environment we daily work in at great length to the students who mostly have intense interests on biology and planing to choose biology as their future major in college.
We are glad that we introduce them the basic molecular biology and microorganism experiments and the corresponding equipments. We demonstrated to them how to correctly use the clean bench doing bacteria related experiments, explained to them the significance of the invention PCR, introduced to them how the electrophoresis apparatus works. The students showed great interests on every corner of the lab because everything is so fresh to them. They also asked some questions about iGEM and our current projects. We then introduced some principle ideas of synthetic biology, and found them generally had solid basic knowledge of biology which surprised us a lot.
We believe that an offline lab tour is the most straight forward way of arousing interests of students. But unluckily, the later education activity designed for high school students are online due to pandemic(See more detail on our Collaboration with NGO page).
For Children in Underdeveloped Area
Lvchun county, Yunnan province, used to be one of the national poor counties in Yunnan Province in China. In January 2014, Chinese government launched the "targeted poverty alleviation" project. A lot of universities in China was paired with specific poor counties in order to backup the local industry and local education. Ocean University of China, the university we OUC-China belongs to, was paired with Lvchun county. One of the programs conducted successfully was a long term supportive education program. Every year, a teaching team composed by some graduate students with various knowledge background went to lvvhun county for a one-year teaching journey. Once their job completed, there would be another teaching team arrive to replace them making it a long-term activity. OUC-China 2020 was the first iGEM team reached the teaching team for collaboration. Due to the epidemic condition on 2020, they chose to conduct online course which turned out to be nice. We also believe that one of the key point of education is its continuity. So this year, we reached out the 2021 teaching team in Lvchun and received warm welcome. The leader of the teaching team Mingyu Wang recommended that we may build a long-term collaboration. Since Qingdao where Ocean University of China locates and Lvchun have thousands miles’ distance, the best way of collaboration is that we provide lectures on line and they help us organize the students in the real classroom. After participating in the activity in person, we are amazed at how dramatically internet access have grown in China. The lecture slides and video went smooth without any lagging or blur, which allowed we to have great interaction with the local children almost like face to face.
On May 16th,2020, the People's Government of Yunnan Province announced that Lvchun county had finally be lifted out of poverty after more than 6 years’ multiple efforts. The name Lvchun in Chinese means greenish spring. We all hope that Lvchun county had already welcomed its new era just its Chinese name indicates. And even though it had already got rid of poverty, its education is still been lag behind the urban area of China. For this reason, we hope our iGEM team along with the supportive teaching group would continuously work together to promote the local education of Lvchun, making our effort to bring them a brighter future!
The online course was well organized thanks to the supportive teaching group. They had projection of the live video on a big screen so that every children can see the slides we prepared. When we raised a question, the co-teacher would unmute the microphone and bring the computer to the children who would like to answer. At first, the local teacher reckoned synthetic biology must be too difficult for children in this age, but we insisted this topic and promised to make it understandable. We made an analogy that the intention synthetic biology is to create a “little goblin” who is extremely hardworking and loyal, just like the scenario in Harry Potter. He may help us degrade toxic pollutants, produce fuel, diagnose diseases and so on. But nowadays, they are bacteria like. The results turned out to be very good. When we discussed the boundary of gene editing, we led them to think whether can they modify their babies’ gene to gain some talents if one day they become parents. We assumed that children might just think on their own perspective, thus support this technology. But surprisingly, almost all of the pupils who voluntarily answered this question were against it. What impressed us the most was one little boy said that parents should love their child who they are, instead of turning him into what they like. Through this answer, we felt the warmth and sparkles of humanity
When we occasionally mentioned that we had created a comic series to popularize synthetic biology, Wang Mingyu, the leader of 2020 OUC supportive teaching teams in Lvchun encouraged us to print the comics out and send them some. We happily accepted this wonderful idea and printed our first edition of OUC-China made comic series: E.coli Spaceship. The comic series are now put in the library of Lvchun first middle school, students can borrow them freely!
Collaborate with NGO
"Zhongyi Society"(it means public welfare in Chinese) is a newly established private non-profit voluntary service organization that provides students and community residents with social practice, public welfare services and professional experience. It aims to gather the strength of social loving units and people, organize and carry out voluntary services and social practice activities for children, adolescents, community residents and other groups.
Its activity center locates only hundreds meters away from the campus of Ocean University of China. We then contacted them and organized an online lecture for local high school students. Our first option is to conduct an offline activity so that we can make good use of the resources of university for visiting a university campus and laboratories can be really beneficial for high school students. However, our university has strict restriction for outsiders visiting university due to pandemic. We then decided to hold a online lecture and have an “online lab tour” for the local high school students. The photo below shows the registration interface of our activity. There are 43 students signed up and attended the activity.
Our course was divided into three sections. We firstly shared an inspiring news lately that a Chinese scientific group successfully achieved transforming carbon dioxide into starch through synthetic biology, possibly solving green house effect and food crisis at the same time! After the lead in, we introduced the basic and classic ideas of synthetic biology, and discussed the possible implementations. The second section was an online lab tour, OUC-R team pre-recorded a video, and introduced the details of every instruments. The third section was more academic, our team elaborated some deeper knowledge of synthetic biology such as logic gate and switch, enabling the students to have a brief idea of how our team projects were designed.
The feedback of the online course:
At the end of the lecture, we asked the students attended to scan a QR code voluntarily to give us some feed back. We received 34 pieces of questionnaire in total. The graph below shows the age distribution of the participated students.
In the questionnaire, we firstly asked the question we cared the most.
We then asked about the satisfaction on the course difficulty, course duration(1.5 h), teaching methods and knowledge structure.
32.4% of the students totally understood the lecture, 52.9% of the students generally understood the lecture, and 14.7% of the students found it a little bit difficult to understand. We are surprised to see that almost one in third of the students clicked the button“Totally Understood” , because Chinese students are generally modest and usually would not reckon they fully understand something. We are pleased to see that our effort of making synthetic biology easy to understand has paid back. But we are still concerned that a small portion of students felt hard to catch up. We found that the students were not very active during the online course. Few questions were asked even though we told them feel free to ask any question if not understood. We think this is probably one of the drawback of online courses. The teachers may have difficulty knowing how much do the students understand for the lack of eye contact. But we also have the experience seeing students were extremely active in online courses for they can raise questions without speaking in public. But this kind of situation usually happens when one or two active students created a active atmosphere first. So for our future improvement and suggestions for other iGEM teams, we recommend asking the students to open their cameras to have eye contact with the teacher. We also recommend to design more Q&A sections to give students more chances to build a “question-asking atmosphere”. The teachers may also achieve this by raising more specific questions as well as the questions of various difficulty to target different students.
91.8% of the students thought the lecture duration is good, 5.9% of the students wanted the duration to be longer for they want to hear more. But there are also 5.9% of the students thought the lecture is a little bit too long. So we would recommend other iGEM teams to choose one and a half hour for the lecture time for the feedback is quite positive.
We further cross analyzed the question2 and question3. Our original inference was that the students who think the lecture duration is too long may be the students who can’t catch up with the lecture, thus choosing “a little bit difficult to understand” in question 2. But we surprisingly found that the two students who think the lecture duration is too long chose“Basically understand” in question 2. Then what do the students who thought the lecture difficult feel about the lecture duration? Interestingly, most of them feel the duration is all right, and some of these students felt the lecture was too short, and they wanted to have more! We are glad to see some students who are thirsty for synthetic biology even though they may have some difficulty currently. We believe the interests are the most precious thing, and will always be the biggest motivation.
76.5% of the students are very satisfied, and the rest felt generally satisfied, no one felt unsatisfied.
We then asked about the learning outcomes.
As we can see from the chart below, even though acceptance rate of the students various, most of the students got to know synthetic biology through the lecture.
Students are asked to rate their interests from 0 to 100(0 for no interests, 100 for super interested). The average score turned out to be 76.74.
Again, students are asked to rate the prospect of synthetic biology from 0 to 100(0 for no future, 100 for bright future). The average score is 90.06. We are happy to see that students’ interests and expectations on the prospects of synthetic biology both scored high. And we believe this two aspects corelated with each other.
94.1% students were willing to participate, 5.9% of the students would depend on the topic. This lecture is one of the very first activities "Zhongyi Society"(NGO) organized, we are honored to have a good start, the content we provided surely interested the students according to the questionnaire feedback. We expect our lecture would also attract more units to provide more professional knowledge of other fields, as well as more students who are willing to use their spare time learn more. Most importantly, we hope the students attended would continue their interests on synthetic biology.
Science Museum Activity
Science museum is the science hub for local people, especially the children who love science. How well a science museum established and activities arranged represents the science atmosphere of science in a city. Thus, we believe that the best place of spreading science knowledge to children is the local science museum. We actively reached the Qingdao Science Museum and expressed our willingness of providing some lectures to local children and luckily received active responds. We felt honored to be invited to attend the 10th Qingdao Science Popularization Lecture of 2021 which is a public welfare activity organized by Qingdao science and Technology Museum regularly. Experts in various fields were invited to provide high-quality popular science activity resources to the public, especially young people hopping to promote the scientific quality of the whole people in our city.
Fan Zhenxiang, the head of Exhibition and Education Department of Qingdao science Museum provided us a lot of support by giving us some suggestions after previewing our prepared syllabus. He firstly arranged our lecture on August 7th, for it is the birthday of Alexander Fleming who is one of the scientist we would introduce to the children. But unfortunately, China experienced a mild and regional epidemic on August, 2021, so we then changed the date to October 3th, 2021.
October 3th was among the national holiday of China, and the activity attracted more than 100 children as well as their parents. In the WeChat official account(social media) of Qingdao Science Museum, this activity was described as follows:
The teacher first taught the knowledge of bacteria and antibiotics, using multimedia and interactive activity to deepen the audience's understanding of the relationship between bacteria and antibiotics, and consolidated the knowledge of health and epidemic prevention. Then, through the analogy of "building blocks", the audience understood the knowledge of "synthetic biology". After then, the contribution and challenge of gene editing technology to society are further discussed. The last part of the activity is the observation and experience section. The teacher prepared bacteria containing fluorescent genes placed in the safety equipment. Through close observing, the audience had a more intuitive understanding of gene editing technology. The audience were very satisfied with this popular science lecture. After class, the children expressed that they should study hard, grow up and engage in relevant scientific research.
We really enjoy having face to face interactions with the local children. We were so surprised to see that the local pupils in Qingdao have a really wide range of knowledge. For example, when introducing the concept intestinal flora, we raised the question why human can’t digest grass but some other mammal such as rabbits and cattle can do so. We received the answer “they have longer intestine” for surprise, because we expected the answer that different animals have different composition of intestinal flora. We praised the boy who offered the answer, and extensively asked them how many stomachs do cattle has. The pupils chorused “F-O-U-R” together. Another thing we were very pleased to see is every child attended the activity was accompanied by at least one parents. It is so precious that parents would like to spare their time, accompanying their child to do something children may gain and grow from. Actually, the parents not just came to the science museum to be with the children only, they listened to the course as well and even participated in the interaction section. When we asked for the attitude they hold toward gene therapy on disease treating. One of the parents questioned how many diseases are caused by gene mutation. It was a really good question, for the common diseases public know are mostly not gene based. Most of the monogenic genetic diseases are rare to see. We are glad that a parent raised this question for children generally know little about diseases. Taking this chance, we explained that even though a single monogenic genetic disease may be rare to see, but the accumulation of total population monogenic with genetic disease is huge. Besides, some mutation may not directly cause specific disease, but may increase the susceptibility of having a specific disease. Thus, gene therapy do has its potential, but still need serious consideration.
We brought some ferrules and badges having “iGEM” images as for the gifts encouraging the children to answer the questions actively. But actually, they are super into the class and actively answered whatever questions we raised with or without encouragement. After the lecture ended, a little girl came to us, wanting to take a photo with us for she wanted to study in Ocean University of China in the future. We express our best wishes to her at there.
We also designed some activities for the local children, that is we brought a medium containing fluorescent bacteria in picachu pattern. The picture below shows children gathering around the blue light meter to see the bacteria excited to emit green fluorescence. The medium was sealed up tightly to ensure safety.
New pollutants workshop
As the initiator of New Pollutants Alliance, we along with other 4 iGEM teams, which are DUT_China, HiZJU-China, Nanjing_NFLS, Shanghai SJTU-BioX, hold a online workshop named New Pollutants Workshop on September 25th, 2021. We invited experts in synthetic biology, ecotoxicology, rapid test and law(See more detail in our Initiator of New Pollutants Alliance page). We tried to enclose people with different background knowledge as well as different identities to have a conversation about new pollutants since it is such a comprehensive social problem and need the collaboration of multiple parties.
Our first intention is self-education, we hope the professional knowledge of ecotoxicology can enrich our projects’ background. Instructing our design to be more practical and meet the real needs of society. We expect the experts in the field of synthetic biology would provide us suggestions on our genetic circuit design. We also hope the joining of high-tech enterprises can inspire us to make our projects into real products. Last but not least, we invited students in Law school to share their ideas on the future of regulation and law related to new pollutants in China. We anticipate that people in nature science and social science can communicate and inspire each other through this platform.
Our second intention is public education. The workshop was open to public and we recorded the workshop, putting it on our official video account(See more detail on our New Pollutants Alliance page).
Here are the mindmaps of New Pollutants Workshop. Hope people viewing our wiki can grasp the highlights of this activity.
Here are part of information and inspirations we got from the workshop:
1.Prof. Yuan Qingbin introduced another aspect of antibiotic resistance risk, that is extracellualr which our team didn’t used to concern. We were surprised at how abundant it is in the environment, and is definitely an inconvenient new pollutants.
2.After knowing one of the main resources of extracellular ARG is released after the death of bacteria, we realized an important fact the widely used safety control such as suicide switch may kill the bacteria and release the antibiotic resistance gene, thus not safe at all. We are then convinced that physical isolation is extremely important and probably is the only safe approach of preventing modified gene releasing into environment.
3.Prof. Yuan’s team have been actively developing smart material(Molecular imprinting technique plus photocatalytic material C3N4) which can bind and degrade specific DNA, making it possible to detect and degrade antibiotic resistant genes. We felt that the wisdom of his team is similar to that of new pollutants alliance members. The only difference was they choose material science while we choose synthetic biology. Especially for our team and Nanjing_NFLS, we all dedicated to resolving the antibiotic related environmental problem. We chose to detect and degrade different sources of the risk, antibiotic and antibiotic resistant gene respectively. Besides, we were so happy to know that prof. Yuan’ s team had already applied their product in sewage treatment plants and received very positive feedback(the removal rate was more than 99.9% after 30 min treatment). We look forward to learn more form the experience of prof. Yuan’s team!
4.Prof.Wang Jun told us that there are two main problems researchers studying microplastic face. One is the not unified methods and standards of isolation and identification of microplastic. There exist urgent need of establishing national wide or even international wide union to set the standards. We also value the the power of union, that is why we initiate New Pollutants Alliance. Unless we gained the participation and support of people in different fields can we reach a consensus and promote problem solving. Another problem is that the commonly used material of studying the ecotoxicity of microplastic is fluorescent microsphere, whose concentration is much larger than that of microplastic in environment, thus can’t reflect(often exaggerate) the real risk human and animals now facing. This fact illuminated us to focus more on the environmental concentration of new pollutants, this will enable us to design more practical products.
5.At the discussion section, Prof. Wang revealed that the degradation of new pollutants now can only be done in sewage treatment plant, because it is unrealistic to apply the technology in ocean. He then appealed that there should be more regulations on plastic using. We realized the limitation of our products, and also see the importance of law refinement.
Prof. He Yide mentioned a tricky problem that dose depended response curve is non-monotonic, making it difficult to determine the hazard threshold.
7.Prof. Wang Baojun introduced a lot of approaches(modules) to realize signal amplification, which was exactly what every team who designs biosensor dream to achieve. We learned several “tricks” and hope to optimize our design in the future. We also discussed the limitation of signal amplification. Prof. Wang reminded us that the output signal intensity is not simple addition signal-amplification-modules. For example, if the expression of house keeping genes are influenced, the signal might decline when more modules were added. Thus, there shall be more trying and testing in order to realize the idealistic design.
8.Prof. Wang’s team combined microfluidic system with biosensor, making it more controllable and safer. What is more, it can show some figures by the micro array wells. He provided us some new ideas of hardware, which we may apply in future.
9.We then discussed the bio safety of biosensor. Prof. Wang told us that besides the genetic safety, physical safety are also important. More importantly, it gave the user the feeling of safety. We then decided to add a filter membrane on our hardware to achieve better physical safety.
10.We discussed the consolidation of cells on paper, which was an approach both our team and prof.Wang’s team had applied. Prof.Wang’s team successfully achieved the concept but our team failed the experiments. We asked him why our cells have poor growth status. Prof.Wang told us that the living cells have higher request on nutrition, that is the reason why they chose cell free system. Prof. Wang suggested us to air dry in nutrient solution, and the addition of water can then revive the cells. This was an extremely good suggestion, we would definitely try in future!