Team:Worldshaper-Nanjing/Communication
1 Introduction
Our project on the conversion of gutter oil is relatively not known by a lot of people. As a result, we made lots of efforts to promote our gutter oil environmental protection project, promote the knowledge and technical means of synthetic biology, and arouse the public's awareness of environmental protection through biological means.
2 All age group
2.1 Official account
To enable anyone interested in our project to receive the latest updates and contact us easily, we created this self-media account “NJ Shaper” . As a weekly update, we present our progress in the laboratory, write a science article, or exhibit our educational meetings’ details. We aimed to equip people with some basic knowledge of synthetic biology and expected everyone who witnessed our progress offer suggestions. Here are some examples of our updates.
2.2 Live broadcast
We held a live broadcast on Bilibili, which is a very popular video application in China. Young people like to use Bilibili for everyday knowledge learning. Moreover, it always comes with interesting information and is convenient for everyone. Our cooperating teams included IvyMaker-China, ASTWS-China, and Worldshaper-Shanghai, which made the webcast an active activity. During the live broadcast, we often received the audience’s positive comments about our projects. They also loved the adorable characters in the picture books we presented.
3 Adult group
Face to face with local community
Two team members, Xuanyi Wang and Ruiqi Ma, joined NNU-China on an interesting tour to a community to propagate our project. The two teams first introduced synthetic biology together, and then we discussed each project separately and distributed leaflets to make the audience fully understand it. As we had already finished with our picture book’s design, we also showed the audience the book. Besides knowing more about the conversion of gutter oil, the people from the community enjoyed the story as well.
4 Youth group and lower age group
4.1 Online synthetic biology seminar
During the summer vacation, our partner team NNU-China offered us a chance to introduce synthetic biology and our iGEM project to a group of students from a mountain area in Guizhou. For our audience were all junior high students, we needed to lower the difficulty for them to understand our experiments in the lab. Our team members introduced the definition of gutter oil and its dangers, and concluded our technical way of converting it into beneficial linolenic acid. NNU-China team’s teammate also showed and explained the laboratory together with all types of equipment inside. Additionally, we shared our human practice progress with our audience, such as the statistics collected through the public questionnaire, and a few interviews with experts in relative fields. The students asked several questions about gutter oil problems in our city, which we answered enthusiastically. We felt proud of ourselves to help students younger than ourselves realize an unprecedented plan of making efforts towards a better world.
4.2 Lecture inside school
Our team members are mainly composed of students from Nanjing Foreign Language School and Jinling Middle School, and they also participants in the School iGEM Club. Therefore, we are provided with a precious chance to offer a lecture as a club activity in September. With previous promotion in the school, we had more audience than expected, making the lecture more colorful and lively. As a lot of the students were interested in biology, our speakers added some more professional knowledge about our experiments and explained some crucial steps carefully. We also prepared a introduction of iGEM, encouraging them to attend the next year’s competition. It became more easy as the lecture went, for all the audience were actively thinking and reacting, creating a pleasant atmosphere.
4.3 Picture book
To make our voice heard by more and more people, Worldshaper-Nanjing designed a picture book on our own. While Che Liu wrote the script for Chinese and English, Junyu Lu completed the painting part. Besides, Han Wu looked for more available sources to translate it into as many languages as we could. We also raised the idea of cooperation among several teams to promote our picture books as a series, and reached an agreement with NNU-China immediately. We are joined by FZU-China, LZU-China, NMU-China, NUDT-China, NWU-China-B, and UM_Macau. We held meetings to discuss the and unify our styles. During various meetings, we presented our series to the audience. Next, this picture book will be printed and distributed to more teenagers and children. We are sure that after reading it, they will have a stronger interest in synthetic biology.
Here is our picture book story: The leading role of the story is a drop of edible oil. After thousands of risks, she finally got a new life in the hands of a group of iGEMers.
