Education & Communication

Ideas of education and Publicity

We believe that science is not limited to theory and experiment but should also focus on communication and connection with the whole society. Therefore, our Human Practice team aims to bring up a positive social impact that covers all age groups, and we deem promoting the scientific spirit and science knowledge our responsibility.

This year, our team plan to expand our positive influence in our community step by step to better promote synthetic biology. Our education program features different activities on and off campus.

Firstly, we decorated the biology classrooms with biology elements: the chemical reaction formula of photosynthesis, the structure of amino acids and DNA, the cell structure diagram, etc. We hope to make the students around us understand more about biology and become interested in it.

Secondly, we conducted regular biology lectures for young biology enthusiasts in junior high school to expand their knowledge. We established the first school-level biology club, designed experiments, and provided a platform for students to discuss and learn biology.

In addition, We hold an exhibition in school to introduce our last year's gold-prize iGEM project from different aspects. We also made a public presentation to let people in different fields have a certain degree of understanding of this year’s research project as well as synthetic biology. Finally, we focused on the publicity of the whole society and posted our articles and videos related to different aspects of our project, as well as other biological knowledge, on different social media.

Decoration of Biology classroom

We have all kinds of biology courses and club activities going on in our biology class. To let every student who comes to the classroom learn in a stronger biological atmosphere and feel the fun of biology, we decorate the biology classroom with self-designed biology-themed wallpaper.

In addition, our art group created some exquisite posters on famous biologists: Franklin Roosevelt, the discoverer of DNA's double helix structure; Schleiden and Schwan, who proposed the cell theory; Yuan Longping, the father of hybrid rice in China; Mendel, who discovered the law of inheritance; and Darwin, who founded the theory of evolution. These posters can educate more people about these great scientists and their scientific achievements.

After careful design and decoration, we finally put our then-empty classroom into a "biology encyclopedia".

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Junior high school’s Biology class

Since Nature reported synthetic genetic circuit research in 2020, synthetic biology has attracted wide attention and has broad application prospects. An emerging field of study, synthetic biology is developing at a rapid speed. We aim to introduce our project while finding interested students in synthetic biology. Compared with last year, our HP activities this year have attracted more attention, but the number of attention is still small. Given this phenomenon, we first focused our activities on junior high school students.

On April 26, we contacted the biology teacher of the junior high department, hoping to deliver a lecture on heredity - An interesting topic for juniors - as well as promote our project.

We carefully prepared the presentation slides. The course consisted of three parts: knowledge presentation, experiment, and Q&A session.

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① The course focuses on the structure of DNA and its main functions. Junior high school students are most interested in the experiment part. We chose the experiment of extracting plant DNA to visualize the content of the knowledge explanation part.

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② This course enables junior students who have yet to learn biology to have a preliminary understanding of DNA. We hope our lecture could empower junior high school students in biology learning and their career as future synthetic biologists.

③ At the end of the course, we connected the course contents with everyday life and introduced the application of DNA technology, such as our mPETase plastic degrading enzyme. We also introduced the importance of environmental protection and plastic recycling, and the basic knowledge of garbage classification, and made an environmental protection appeal with the juniors.

After understanding the knowledge of DNA, we continue to provide students with advanced courses on synthetic biology: the relationship between amino acids and proteins, the transcription and translation of DNA, the knowledge of biochemical molecules, and so on. In the last class, we introduced the project composition and research progress of BJEA_Chian on BslA. Let students better understand the connotation of synthetic biology, and therefore join the synthetic biology community.

An experimental course for kindergarteners

Because we want synthetic biology and iGEM to affect everyone in society, we decided to bring the fun of experiments to kindergarteners. Considering their limited knowledge and skills, children cannot perform some experiments on synthetic biology, so we designed an interesting experiment exclusively for children, so they can feel the fun of scientific research.

Club

When reflecting on our last year's project, we realize that students in our school did not have any access to synthetic biology; Our school also did not have any biology clubs or any type of platform for biology discussion in general. Therefore, we decided to establish BioGem (Biology + iGEM), a subject contest club. Our primary purpose for the club is to popularize synthetic biology and create a platform for middle and high school students to communicate synthetic biology. We utilize the club to provoke students' interest in synthetic biology.

Before initiating the activities, our team members had several meetings and designed different activities. The activities are suitable and beneficial for every club member, including students from grade 7 and up to grade 11. The planned activities include basic experiments on synthetic biology: growing bacteria in culture and extracting plant DNA and live plant proteins. Simultaneously, it helps to strengthen students' knowledge of biology textbooks and expand it.

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Our club activities this term are centered around bacteria. For example, in the first activity, we use toothpicks to pick bacteria on our teeth and inoculated them onto the culture medium. We incubated them at a constant temperature for a week. Students are often concerned about the results of their experiments, and from time to time they come to the classroom to observe their Petri dishes. After a week, we collectively observed the number and status of the colonies. The bacteria growth reminded us to pay more attention to oral health. We also conducted experiments on plant DNA extraction, which can display the otherwise invisible DNA in front of us, which is the essence of synthetic biology (using and molding biomolecules to improve certain functions). The club members were very interested in the do-it-yourself experiment and actively participated in it.

During the club activities, we were surprised that a lot of junior high students joined the club due to their extreme crave and love for this field of study. Not only did we, the planners for the club activities, enjoy what we were doing, but at the same time, we were also glad to see that the contexts and events we organized approached our aims. After understanding the knowledge of DNA, we continue to provide students with advanced courses on synthetic biology: the relationship between amino acids and proteins, the transcription and translation of DNA, the knowledge of biochemical molecules, and so on. In the last class, we introduced the project composition and research progress of BJEA_Chian on BslA. Let students better understand the connotation of synthetic biology, and therefore join the team of synthetic biology research.

We edited our club activities into videos and uploaded them to our WeChat official account. We were honored to receive the attention of the school, and we are invited by BJEA's special "Appointment with the principal" to have a direct dialogue with the principal, and we had in-depth communications with the school leaders on this year's iGEM project. Of course, our project has won praise and support from the school leaders, and the school is willing to provide us with all the support it can. Our club, Biogem, became a university-level 4-star club. The school-level public account of Beijing Etown Academy also publicized our club and made iGEM and synthetic biology known to more people.

Affected by the epidemic in Beijing, many of our offline courses and experiments could not be carried out. Alternatively, we designed rich and interesting experiments and did more homework on synthetic biology during this long-term home time, aiming to let more young people feel the charm of synthetic biology.

Exhibition

To expand the influence of IGEM and synthetic biology, we integrated the project from different aspects of last year and made an exhibition board for students, teachers, and people from all walks of life to visit in the avenue of the school.

There were a lot of students and teachers who praised our display and showed great interest in the exhibition. Through this exhibition, we are not only expanding our influence, but also promoting synthetic biology, and more importantly, we are raising awareness about the dangers of plastic.

Public Presentation

what we have done

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Our team presented our research topic to students from grade 9 to grade 10, teachers of different courses, and people from all walks of life. This allowed us to introduce our research for iGEM, which is using a hydrophobin - BslA - to construct fusion proteins with PET degradation enzyme mPETase to degrade PET plastic, constructed fusion protein with human antimicrobial peptide LL-37 to enlarge the range of pathogens affected, including the introduction of our research purpose, the solution to the issues that our team came up with, the specific experiment methods, and the expected outcomes. We were also able to use this opportunity to introduce, explain, and persuade audiences (junior students) that were not taught or never heard of bio-construction, and how it could benefit society with further development with more specific details.

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Our achievements

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The school gave us a week to prepare for the presentation. Our team members worked together effectively.

What made us better

Not only did we have students as our audience, but we also attracted teachers and parents from various fields. In the end, we got feedback on how we should improve with techniques for presenting ourselves. Generally, the feedback benefited us with planning HP events afterward. Nonetheless, teachers from various fields expressed to us how they were interested in the idea of plasmid construction on enzymes and plastic degradation after our presentation. Many foreign teachers are interested in our project. Grade 10 English teacher Sahara is very interested in our project experiment process and looks forward to participating in and experiencing our experiment; Mike, an English teacher in Grade 11, is very interested in the final application of our project and looks forward to its impact in real life. The majority of the audiences were especially satisfied with how the idea and theoretical efficacy of bio-degradation could stand out from the currently used systems. This gave us the hint and perception to modify our HP activities. At the same time, the encouragement from the audience motivates us to complete the iGEM tasks later on.

We-media publicity

Debunking rumors video

We all come across rumors in our lives, some of which are very clearly against science, so we've created a debunking video to refute these rumors and help people, especially the elder, distinguish between rumors and facts.

Our debunking video has racked up over 2,000 views! People also left comments under our video, saying that they finally made their elderly family understand that the rumors in real life are wrong, bringing great help to their lives. We believe that through our efforts, people will have a new understanding of these rumors.

Women scientists tweet and video

We found that the social stereotype of female scientists is very serious, which may hamper the academic performance of women, affect the career choice of women, and hinder the career development of women scientists. To reduce the social prejudice against female scientists, we continue to publicize many experiences and achievements of female scientists in history on our official account and encourage and support women at the end of the article. In the comments on our WeChat official account, many people said that our female scientists' tweets were very enlightening to them, which made them feel very meaningful and increased their knowledge at the same time.

We have teamed up with TJUSLS_China, and their team has also promoted a series of articles on female scientists, which will bring more attention to this issue and gradually weaken the stereotype of female scientists.

In May 2022, we launched the second sub-project of our promotion campaign: “We can do it!” self-narrative. In the first part of this project, we invited BJEA faculty members and professionals in STEM fields, mostly females, to talk about their road to success and experience. They encouraged girls to endeavor into STEM fields and pursuit their dream fearlessly, and we are very excited to see teachers talking about how they confronted with stereotypes and defeated them, or professionals disproving stereotypes with their personal experience. In the second part of this project, as future scientists who are influenced by stereotypes, we want us and our peers’ voice to be heard by the public. We made the self-narratives of the professionals and our classmates into videos and posted them on social media platforms.

The Education Video

When we first entered the laboratory, everything in the laboratory was strange. All the machines and instruments were in front of us. Because of the safety regulations in the laboratory, we had to learn how to use all the instruments and machines in the laboratory, which cost us a lot of time in the early stage. So, we came up with a little video to show people who are interested in the experiment and want to know about it. We spent some time shooting and editing videos, hoping to make the learning process as interesting and efficient as possible.

Organizing synthetic biology lectures

Finally, we held an online lecture on synthetic biology science together to popularize the principles of synthetic biology. In the lecture, our team was mainly responsible for the PPT beautification work, and we put the publicity of the lecture on the public platform in order to attract more audiences from different ages and walk of life. In the end, the lecture was held successfully, and we helped more people get to know about the field of synthetic biology.

Art exhibition

We held a synthetic biology art exhibition at the Beijing 798 Art Center with several teams from Beijing that are: iBowu_China, SHSBNU_China, Tsinghua, Keystone, BIT_China, ATCG.

Members from art groups designed the exhibition board in advance, and HP members introduced the design details of our project to passers-by who are who are interested in our topics at the 798 Art Center.

To spread out, our team vividly depicted three projects around BsLA in the form of cartoons: improving traditional ATPS by incorporating a continuous-flow system and replacing fungal hydrophobins with BslA, constructing LL37-BslA fusion protein to further improve LL-37's binding ability to bacteria, and constructing the mPETase-BslA fusion protein to explore and increase the mPETase's potential in PET degradation. In addition, we also drawn two abstract works that represent the vision of our project, which one painting shows, "Even if we don't know the way to the future, we should follow the light, and another painting shows “The battle of plastics at the bottom of the ocean, where BslA and mPETase combine to break through the biological limitations of plastics. "

one painting shows, "Even if we don't know the way to the future, we should follow the light. "Another painting shows" the battle of plastics at the bottom of the ocean, where BslA and mPETase combine to break through the biological limitations of plastics. "

The passengers in of 798 daily is considerable. After a day of exhibition, many people have heard our introduction, and have a new understanding of the field of synthetic biology. Vividly and concisely presenting our topics to passers-by in the form of animation art paintings has given people of all ages who have not been exposed to this field have a certain new understanding.

Vlog

We continued our experiment during the summer vacation, which lasted nearly 21 days. Every team member would record some experiments or moments in life every day. Because everyone on the team had different experimental priorities, we wanted to make a complete record and make our Vlog by recording videos. We can show the public how our experiment works. This not only brings more sense of ritual and experience to our experiments but also adds fun to the experimental work of recording the process. Our Vlog is published on WeChat video accounts, Bilibili, and TikTok. In the comments section of various video websites, viewers also showed great interest and support for our videos and indicated where they could see the full version of the experiment.

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Summarize the harvest

In our education activity, we targeted different groups of students. We used classroom layout to increase the student's interest in learning. The courses for junior high school students enlighten the junior high school students on biology. The display activities in the school let a lot of students and teachers know about our projects and experiments; For the young people in society, our scientists tweet to help them better understand the people who have made contributions to the biology discipline. Our anti-counterfeiting video also helps elderly people to identify the rumors around them.

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