Team:XHD-Wuhan-Pro-China/Education
Education&Communication
Survey
We started an online survey to learn about how our project were perceived by the public. It turned out that a considerable proportion of the respondents held positive attitudes towards our ideas of constructing a genetically engineered probiotics to promote the degradation of alcohol in the human body, believing that it is possible to achieve the goal and granting our project with high expectations. The survey results further convinced us of the significance of our project. Also, from the survey, we learnt that the majority of people still knew nothing about synthetic biology or iGEM. This helped us determine one of our focuses in later promotion activities which was to first introduce synthetic biology and iGEM to our audience.
In school propaganda
Thanks to the biomedicine club of Affiliated High School of China Ocean University, XHD-Wuhan-Pro-China team introduced knowledge and ideas of Synthetic Biology and Bioengineering to the students in Affiliated High School of China Ocean University. During the education, we also interpreted our program to the students who are interested in it.
In the presentation, many students asked up questions about our research and design process, and we answered each of them carefully. After the meeting, we made notes about ideas of improvements on the safety of our project in whether our probiotic will survive in alcohol. In our next experimental section, we tested our probiotic’s alcohol resistance to ensure its normal function.
Association With Wuhan Britain China School Britain Platelet First Aid club
The leader of the Platelet first aid club of Wuhan Britain China School agreed to allow our team to make a 20 minute presentation to introduce our project to the club members, which are biology and medical enthusiasts. 2 of our team members came in person and talked about the aim and design of our project. After the presentation, the students were very curious about our lab conditions and asked many questions on it. The presentation raised people’s awareness of the harm of alcohol as well as synthetic biology. Many students showed interest of taking it as a potential future major in universities.
Official account
On our official account, we introduced iGEM and our team. Also, we recorded our progress on the project in the form of a log. Additionally, we post articles discussing about some ethical issues in biology, such as “savior sibling”. We hope through the platform of WeChat official account which is commonly used in China, we could reach out to a wider audience.