Overview
To let more people of different ages and various fields know about synthetic biology, our team holds several activities. In these activities, we not only introduce the knowledge about synthetic biology, but also the contents of our team project and IGEM. We hope that these efforts we have made can improve public awareness of synthetic biology.
WeChat official account
Our team set up our own WeChat official account, and publish many articles.
These articles included the introduction of both our team projects, IGEM, and synthetic biology. Even many details of experiment are shown in this account, like the knowledge about the main substance of our project ‘BPA’.
Our parents, classmates, friends and teachers followed our WeChat official account, even some strangers. Our articles are simplified but very easy to understand and include all the main ideas. So people are able to learn about synthetic biology in their spare time. These articles not only let more people around us know more about synthetic biology field, and also let them to be interested with that. We have wider audience to read our articles. In another word, more and more people know about that by our WeChat official account.
Lecture in BFSU International Curriculum Centre
To conduct more effective propaganda, we had a speech in a high school called BFSU international Course Centre. We focus on the high school students and educate them about the field of synthetic biology.
All the students from grade 10 to 12 participate in this activities. Because of the limitation of students number, we also had live broadcast online. This helps us to enlarge the range of audience, so more people could watch this speech.
Before the presentation, we knew that lots of students never heard about synthetic biology. Because of students’ poor understanding in this field and low level of their biology knowledge, we tried to use easy way to let them understand the basic theory about synthetic biology and our projects.
Also, apart from the knowledge and theories, we shared about our feelings and experience during laboratory and during this project. Most of students were interested in the pictures we took in laboratory.
After the speech, we got many feedbacks. Some students told us that they are interested in this activity and want to try it. Moreover, the students who were already interested in biology found that they want to learn more in this field.
In this section, with cooperated with the LZU-HS-China-A and LZU-HS-China-C, so we had better preparations about these lecture.
Education materials
Firstly, we made a PPT for the lecture. It included the introduction of synthetic biology, our project, IGEM and some feelings about this activity.
In addition, we designed a porcelain cup for popularizing the field of synthetic biology. By using an eye-catching slogan, more people may get interested in synthetic biology. We also printed a QR code for our WeChat official account, so that when scanning, people can read the article about synthetic biology. Plus, to alert more people to the dangers of BPA, we designed a porcelain cup. Because bisphenol A is usually in a plastic cup, this porcelain cup and the pattern on that can give people a warning of BPA.
This is our model for a porcelain cup.
Moreover, we made a flyers to help audience know and have a better understanding in the speech. We also put the information about cooperation on the flyers. This flyer was posted on the school bulletin board, students can easily see that.
we made a poster to publicize the harm of BPA and the knowledge about biosensors.
Questionnaire
To know the public understanding of bisphenol A and conduct propaganda, we made a questionnaire from July 26 to September 11.
About 950 people answered the questionnaire. They are from different ages, and even different countries. Most of them are younger than 18 years old from China.
At the beginning of the questionnaire, just 260 people (27.93%) have heard of BPA before, but nearly 671 people (72.07%) never know what bisphenol A is. This date shows that most of people didn’t know BPA and even the harm of BPA around them.
Our questionnaire included the introduction of BPA. So at the end of the questionnaire, we asked them whether they have a better understanding through this questionnaire. 874 people (93.88%) answered that they had a preliminary understanding about BPA, only 57 people (6.12%) answered “no”.
Through this data, we can know that more people know about BPA from our questionnaire, so we had a successful public education.
Summary
Our team have done many activities in education, like publishing articles on social media, having publicity speech, questionnaire and so on. We believed that many people learnt the knowledge of this field from us and more people know about this subject. Hoping that more students will choose synthetic biology by IGEM and make achievement in this field.
