1. SCIENCE COMMUNICATION TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC
During our project, we contacted some communities. We hoped to give lectures to popularize flavonoids, letting more people know what our project is doing and what we can bring to society. After contacting and considering the epidemic's impact, the dry team came to New Oriental English School in Xuhui to give speeches to teachers and students there. Therefore, our team did lots of preparation work to make the professional content of the project easier to understand for the public. We prepared PPT, documents, and interactive games in advance and exhibited roll-up banners and peripheral products outside the lecture classroom.
Firstly, we introduced our team and the aim of the project to the audiences. Then, by giving examples of vegetables and fruits that contain flavonoids in daily diet, we popularize the functions and benefits of flavonoids to them, such as anti-aging, anti-tumor, cancer treatment, antibiosis, etc. Then, we help audiences understand better by analyzing how the human body absorbs flavonoids because it is difficult to know if they have no idea of biology.
Next, we gave out some questions with awards to the audience to test if they really understand the content of our lecture. If they can answer all the questions we asked correctly, they will get blind boxes containing our peripheral products like stickers, badges and key chains.
After the interesting interactive games, some of the audiences were interested in our peripheral products. We also introduced these peripheral products' designs and patterns to them. Since we gave lectures in the New Oriental English School, audiences who bought our peripheral products were mainly teachers. And we hope they can help us propagate our Wechat official account and peripheral products.
Through our lectures and publicity, our team introduced our project and iGEM competition to teachers and students. Also, we hope more people will know about flavonoids and their benefits after listening to the lectures. We look forward to investigating more products that can improve absorption of flavone to contribute to clinic treatment and health care and impacting the world positively through our hard work.
2. SURVEY TRIPS
Firstly, we issued a questionnaire concerning flavonoids to the general public to understand our research and development and the prospect of applying the results in the future. In our questionnaire, we set the following questions to obtain the information we want: 1. Will you know what substances are in the food you use? 2. Do you know the substance flavone? 3. If bioengineering can promote the absorption of flavonoids to improve the anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and anti-tumor effects, will you choose to accept it? A total of 348 people participated in the questionnaire survey; through data statistics, we can know that most people don't understand don't even know flavonoids, but after know the benefits of flavonoids, about 70% of people will be interested in is advantageous to the absorption of flavonoids products, in other words, our research and development and the future is very promising in the application of product.
Additionally, we went to the streets of Shanghai to survey people about our project topic. We interviewed 54 people, including young women, men, middle-aged women, men, and foreigners. We found out that nearly most people have an inferior understanding of flavone and its benefits, except those who have learned biology and nutrition. Also, over half of the public is receptive to new drugs that help absorb flavonoids if the product is safe and effective. On the other hand, it was shown that people who didn't trust our new drugs were worried about the side effects or had no idea of flavones. Therefore, we need to publicity the public about flavone and its benefits to the human body. What's more, safety and effects of our product need to be ensured and improved to let the public trust and try our product.
3. SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM
We chose the public account of Wechat as the social platform. We have a lot of followers on this platform, and the tweets we sent on it include the introduction of our team, the popularization of flavonoids and the promotion of our project.
Through the background data, we can know that a total of 638 people have followed our public account, and the number of clicks has been entirely 3100, and the number of people who open our tweets many times has reached about half. So our public account played a promotion role and let people have a deeper understanding of flavonoids.
