Team:THIS-China/Communication

Teaching

Another sector of our group’s HP includes education for raising awareness of dental health. We mainly focused our teachings upon primary students in international schools around Beijing, including Tsinghua International School, International School of Beijing, Beijing New Talent Academy, and Beijing World Youth Academy. We accomplished teaching through presentations as well as in-person demonstrations and interactions. In the beginning, we were aiming to promote the importance of dental health to a variety of people. Since most of the teenagers and adults are already aware of the importance of their teeth, we decided to instead target the audience of primary students. We chose this specific age group because they are mature enough to understand advice but have not been educated enough to have a good understanding of dental health. In addition, to accommodate for a typical primary student’s short attention span, we included numerous activities and hands-on demonstrations within our presentations, along with a PowerPoint filled with pictures and videos. In the end, we successfully made kids around numerous international schools in Beijing more aware of dental problems such as dental plaque, gum disease, bad breath, tooth decay, and oral cancer. Through the use of demonstrations, we taught primary students about how to brush properly, floss properly, choose a suitable toothbrush, and break bad habits that could lead to dental problems. Lastly, we encouraged all students to start a healthy habit of regularly brushing, flossing, and dentist check-ups. Finally, we have kept in contact with some of the primary students and they have reflected on how our teaching has had an impactful influence on their daily habits. Hopefully, in the future, they will be free of dental problems because of what we taught them.

Figure 1: Students watching our education video.

In addition to education that we did for the primary students from different schools, we also created a video for primary and secondary students. We decided to create a video because we wanted to spread awareness and information regarding synthetic biology to a broader community, one that is beyond our school and the neighboring schools. Therefore, we uploaded our video to bilibili, a website that nearly everyone in China uses. This will help us achieve our goal and make our content accessible to a much wider audience. Our target audience will be the student body, from older primary students to secondary or even university level students. Synthetic biology is a topic that students do not typically learn while in school, so it has a fairly large audience base. In the easy-to-understand and concise video, we introduce basic ideas in synthetic biology. This aligns with our goal of introducing synthetic biology and making more people interested in it.

Our education video.

Figure 2: Us teaching primary school students.