Team:XJTU-China/Education

Education

Overiew

Our effort absolutely not limited to the project itself because we endeavor to make more positive influence on the nowadays society. This year, we focus on mental problems like anxiety, insomnia and depression and basic knowledge about nutriology. As a consequence, diverse types of activities are planned and carried out to impart healthy lifestyle to people, which we think is more important than doing the project itself. Lectures towards different age of students, debate competition, brochure, hands-on experience, visit to factories, all of these let us find more possibilities to enlarge the meaning of our project and we are always eager to try these new things.

Offline Activities

1. Lecture for High School Students about Synthetic Biology and iGEM

It’s our expectation to enhance the public’s comprehension of synthesis biology, therefore, we sought an appreciable opportunity to organize a lecture about synthesis biology and its technologies for high school students. More than demonstrating the basic theories and technologies of bioscience, during the lecture, we’d like to discuss how bioscience had contributed to the development of the society.

To achieve our goal, we introduced the basic philosophy and technologies of synthetic biology. Meanwhile, we discussed the development, prospect as well as the existing controversy of synthetic biology in order to arose their cognition of bio-safety and bioethics.

On this basis, we demonstrated the overview of iGEM to them and those novel and valuable projects from previous competitions. We not only did enlighten the youngsters’ awareness of bringing improvements to the world, but also lead them to understand the responsibility they ought to shoulder.

2. Summer Camp Activities——Go to Laboratory

We are dedicated to introducing bioscience to kids and cultivating their active attitude towards science and their interest to exploring the nature. Therefore, we decided to organize summer camps activities for high school and elementary school students.

At the same time, we also taught high school students to do an experiment of painting with fluorescent E.coli to get them directly fascinated by the charm of experiment, through which they would gain not only technique, but also the comprehension of the beauty of bioscience.

During the summer camp, we guided them into advanced laboratories of synthesis biology in order to illustrate synthesis biology and its real-word applications. While visiting the lab, we introduced them the standards of operation in the lab and its significance, as well as iGEM, which is the top competition in the realm of synthesis biology, guiding them to explore the joy of ameliorating the world with their own hands.

Moreover, we organized a mini-brainstorm to guide them to consider how to make use of biotechnology to bring benefits to the society. They were quite immersed into the activity, coming up with a plenty of brilliant ideas, for instance, utilizing good germs to kill bad germs to cure inflammations and simulating the circumstance inside the gut to produce Dog Coffee, an analog to Cat Coffee. We expect to stimulate their active thought and their interest to synthesis biology, and ultimately, guiding them to be the next generation of iGEMers!

3. Debate Competition

It is a good way to attract the general public’s interest by carrying out novel popular science activities about hot issues. Considering the needs of effective knowledge spread, interesting science popularization, thought-provoking discussion topics and so on, we conducted a debate competition with the theme of "Is gene editing a good news or disaster for mankind?" for college students.

During the race, debaters showed audiences plenty of details about gene editing technical, laboratory research and commercial conditions, advantages and possible risks over traditional biotechnology, and also ethical issues that cause public concerns. We planned to help the audiences to view gene editing and other techniques in a more scientific and holistic way, at the same time, help them understand the benefits and potential risks of synthetic biology.

There is no doubt that college students are newcomers to scientific research, which means it is quite significant to help them gain appropriate attitude of "being responsible" during their academic researches. In the conclusion stage, debaters took "Responsible for humanity" as the summary of the debate, aiming to guide the audiences have a deep understanding of the principle of "safe, beneficial and responsible" while using scientific technologies. The audiences responded enthusiastically to the heated debate and joined us afterwards for a more in-depth discussion of synthetic biology technique and controversy in this area.

During this excellent debate, an interaction of ideas happened among iGEMers, debaters and audiences with vast curiosities of biotechnology, which inspired us a lot in considering the use of biotechnology and its scientific introduction.

4. Lecture of healthy life for Primary School Students

We actively share our social responsibility to pay back the kindness we received from the society. As a consequence, we take an active part in carrying out the activities about the popularization of science and bring the idea of healthy life to the public. And according to the review with Pro.Zhang Yali before, we have agreed on one issue: to prevent health problems, no matter psychology or physiology, preparing individuals with appropriate knowledge about these problems is quite important. While kids at their age of 12-13 are actually in the key stage of growing, we are supposed to equip them with the idea of living a healthy life, both physically and mentally.

With the help of Pro.Zhang, we got in touch with a primary school in Xi’an. And we deliver a lecture about living health during their growth. We simply focused on three main aspects of children life at their age: daily routine, eating habits and mental health, all of them were closely connected to students’ life and their current health situation. What surprised us most was that all kids were quite enthusiastic to share their understanding of healthy lifestyle and take an active part in the interaction with us. To be honest, it extremely inspired and encouraged us to bring more benefit to the public through what we majored in and what we have learned. In the near future, even after the competition of iGEM, we will continue to make our own contribution to leading people to have a healthy lifestyle.

5. Visit to the Shaanxi Qinyang Changsheng Liquor Factory

In order to address the issues during the fermentation of tryptophan including bacterial contamination, strain passage and product purification, we decided to pay a visit to the related factories. But the restriction of epidemic had a great impact on our plan. After contacting for a long time and considering the possibility, we went on a field trip to tour the Shaanxi Qinyang Changsheng Liquor Co., Ltd, to find the similar methods we may apply in our projects.

We interviewed Mr. Wang Ping and Mr. Wu Dongping there, and drew on their experience concerning technology used in industrial brewing process.

First of all, we visited the whole production line with the staff’s guide. Mr. Wang and Mr. Wu pointed out that the qualified personnel, the control of technological skills and equipment sanitization are the requisites for contamination avoidance. In addition, since fermentation is literally a process with complex mixtures of various microbes, it is not realistic to circumvent all the pollutant. We also gained insight into the separation techniques and the way to maintain microbiological stable (by controlling the key strains in different techniques). Furthermore, to ensure the quality of fermented products, it is vital to create a condition (temperature, humidity etc.) suitable for microbes.

Mr. Wang and Mr. Wu also pointed out that one of the main research directions in this filed is removing the mycotoxin, which is potentially responsible for contamination out of the fermentation system, though Qinyang Changsheng Liquor Co., Ltd doesn’t have a process relating to it.

Online Activities

1. Postcards about Nutriology

Because we try to make difference to people’s diet in order to improve release their mental health problems, knowledge about nutriology is also essential. As we hope to interact with a population as large as possible, we plan to compile some materials that are easy to spread among the public, such as brochure painted with cartoon characters and popular science information. More than being used as bookmarks and gifts that are exchanged among friends, it can also be used like postcards to be attached to postal parcels. Therefore, our materials can be kept and carried with ease, and they can be read more often through the processes of mailing and exchanging.

Being one of the essential amino acids of human being, tryptophan, the product of our project, has a vital nutritional value. Based on this, we’d like to demonstrate the public more information about alimentology, so that they can have a better understand of supplements and have a more reasonable diet.

How could we popularize knowledge of alimentology briefly as well as vividly? That’s a problem that have bothered us. Fortunately, we’ve reached a consensus that above all, we should at least design some vivid cartoon characters, such as delicious food and starving kids, which will help make our materials more interesting and attractive.

2. Online Popularization of Science

We’ve organized offline education programs covering university students, high schoolers and elementary school pupils. However, it’s obvious that the range of face-to-face programs can be limited, thus, we consider online education not only a supplement, but also a surpass to offline ones.

Ever since we decided the theme of our project, we’ve begun to integrate our accessibility of top social media sites and platforms to assist our online education program about iGEM, synthesis biology, alimentology and mental health. The sites and platforms we use include those that are popular throughout the world, by which we mean Twitter and Instagram, as well as Bilibili, Acfun and Wechat, which are frequently used by Chinese people.

Wechat Official Account

We took over the official account created in 2017, the year that XJTU-China begin to participate in iGEM. Wechat is a platform on which we add significance to, because it’s the popular platform covering the widest age range of users.

On this account, we posted dedicatedly designed science popularizations, such as A Brief History of BioBricks and guidance to our previous projects, to convey the idea of making difference to our daily life with biotechniques and to demystify synthesis biology.

Moreover, we updated the progress of our project on this account as well to demonstrate what exactly iGEMers do so that we can help popularize iGEM.

Bilibili and Acfun

These video sites are usually considered equivalent to each other, yet they do have different ranges of users. Therefore, we post the same contents on them to cover as large a population as possible. It’s worth emphasizing that the typical user of these websites are high schoolers and university students, who have a basic ability of apprehending scientific concepts and the possibility of becoming future participants of iGEM. Hence, we made sure that the contents meet the balance between enjoyable and scientific and demonstrated the diversity of our activities, including debate, interviews and so on.

Instagram and Twitter

As iGEM being an international competition and the problem of mental health being a worldwide problem, it’s invisibly required that we should not limit ourselves to our own country. We translated our contents and made sure that our updates on these platforms are simultaneous to those on domestic sites.

Baidu, a Surprise

Serving over 4.8 billion person-times per month, Baidu is the largest and most visited searching engine of China. It really surprised us that when we searched iGEM on Baidu, our promotion video showed up on the first page , meaning that it has been one of the most popular pieces of information relevant to the keyword in China and will continue to have a relatively high click rate among the contents.

For those who are interested in synthesis biology or are considering participating in iGEM, our video will definitely play a positive role in their decision.

Ultimately, our efforts are oriented in effectiveness. We elaborately manage our online education program not to merely advertise our project, but to spread the idea of utilizing synthesis biology to solve real-life problems, to demonstrate the diversity of iGEMers’ activities, to help develop the healthy diet and sleeping mode and to contribute to the post-pandemic mental recovery as well.

3. Seminar about synthetic biology and iGEM

Ever since we posted the notice of recruiting members, we’ve got numbers of fellow students from different areas mentioning that although lacking relevant knowledge or skills, they are rather interested in synthesis biology and are willing to dive into it. This really delighted us since we consider popularizing synthesis biology a beneficial program and in addition, we hope to recruit members that are majored in various areas to ensure the diversity and inclusiveness of the team.

Thus, during the winter vacation of 2021, we organized 7-day-long synthesis biology workshop to basically introduce synthesis biology and other skills that are necessary in iGEM in order to popularize synthesis biology and to incidentally recruit new members. We invited former iGEMers and seniors majored in relevant areas to give presentations about molecular biology, synthesis biology, biotechniques, modeling and so on.

Despite that it was conducted online within the vacation, our workshop turned out to be rather popular among students. We are delighted to have demonstrated synthesis biology and its unique idea of introducing the industrial concepts into biological realm. Even though some of the participants didn’t make it to be our team members, this workshop was still a remarkable activity through which we popularized synthesis biology, and ultimately, spread the idea of making differences to our world with bio-techniques among our fellow students.

Guidance to synthesis biology delivered by Mengmeng Xu, team leader of XJTU-China-2019.

Instructions to biological experiments and biotechniques delivered by this year’s team leaders in which the theories and processes of PCR, gel electrophoresis and microbial culturing were thoroughly demonstrated.

Meet iGEM Modeling by Gao Xufan and Guo Qirui, team members of XJTU-China-2020 who were in charge of dry lab, featuring the general process of mathematical modeling and the unique characters of iGEM modeling as well. Explaining iGEM modeling with cases of the previous projects of XJTU-China, their guidance made modeling transform from an abstract technique to series of concrete processes.

Ending

All in all, although the situation of the current epidemic creates many obstacles throughout the process: many originally planned off-line visits and activities were canceled, we have already tried our best to enlarge the meaning and influence of our project, to bring more positive changes to people’s sleep even life quality. And we strongly believe that great power could be generated even with limited conditions, because of our enthusiasm and passion for making change!