Overview

BNU-China’s education session carried out a multi-level and interactional education system, including social education, school education and further. We have established contacts with various organizations and individuals. We have designed customized materials for people in different ages and occupations. Also, communication with teams from other schools will complement our expertise in synthetic biology. By giving people the right insights on the products and applications of genetic engineering and exchanging experience with other iGEM teams, we sincerely hope that we can benefit people around the world and contribute our humble strength in the field of synthetic biology!

Education

Social Education

Questionnaire survey

Knowledge of the addiction of cannabis should not only be well known by researchers and medical staff, but also be popularized at the level of the whole society. Considering that all the members of our team are college students, it is necessary to solve the problem of how to promote the investigation on the understanding of cannabis and other drugs to groups of all ages and occupational structures. Questionnaire survey is the best choice to solve the problem of the audience. As a commonly used survey instrument, questionnaires can not only target people's knowledge of cannabis, but also allow subjects to express their opinions to a great extent due to its advantages of good anonymity. The details of our questionnaire are as follows.

 

In the questionnaire, we fully considered the privacy protection of the filling personnel, and only knew the age stage and education background of them. We then used pictures to examine the level of participants' knowledge of traditional and new drugs. After that, we investigated the subjects’ knowledge of drug abuse and their ability to detect and deal with it in a timely and effective manner from the perspective of drug abuse. The results of such problems also played an important role in guiding our project design. Moreover, we surveyed participants about symptoms of taking drugs and their knowledge of China's laws and regulations on drugs. Finally, we set up a series of questions about "cannabis" and asked the participants their opinions on the medical value of cannabis and other drugs. We set problems about distinction between traditional and new drugs, symptoms of taking drugs and knowledge of Chinese laws and regulations on drugs, etc. Through the above problems, we can start from the perspective of the social level, and have a comprehensive and sufficient understanding of the popular science of cannabis and people's opinions.

From the results of our pre-experimental questionnaire distribution (a small-scale test before the official distribution of the questionnaire) and the results of the official questionnaire analysis, we found that most people do not fully understand the knowledge involved in the questionnaire, or even have a poor understanding. Our initial version of the pre-experimental questionnaire did not set up answers that pop up automatically after the questionnaire was submitted, but the people who participated in the initial test after the pre-experimental questionnaire expressed their desire to know the correct answers to these questions. This made us realize that our questionnaire itself has stimulated the enthusiasm of the people for independent science learning to a certain extent, so we designed the automatic answer pop-up after the questionnaire. In this sense, our questionnaire not only provided the population with knowledge about drugs, including cannabis, but also strongly stimulated their desire to learn more about synthetic biology on their own.

Consulting hospital experts

This year, our topic is closely related to the medical value of cannabis extract. Therefore, apart from understanding people's cognition of medical cannabis through questionnaire survey, it is necessary to refer to the opinions of professional health care workers as a supplementary means to the completeness of the project. In this regard, we interviewed Dr. Shen Yejun, Chief Physician of Neurology and Associate Professor of Nantong University in Rudong County People's Hospital of Jiangsu Province (Rudong Hospital affiliated to Nantong University), and Dr. Luo Pei, Director of Cardiovascular Medicine, about the clinical application of cannabis and its extracts in China and their views on this.

Fig.1 The visit to Rudong County People's Hospital and the talk with Dr. Shen Yejun

During the interview, both doctors mentioned cannabidiol products. Today, there are five companies authorized to produce cannabidiol products in China and studies have shown that such cannabis extracts have utility in treating epilepsy, major depression, anxiety, insomnia, and even have anti-cancer effects. Both doctors affirmed the medical value of cannabis extracts, but both equally agreed that since China is not a cannabis-combined country, the use of cannabis products is highly controversial legally, ethically, and in terms of price. In the case that cannabis drugs are not irreplaceable, hospitals and patients would prefer the commonly used traditional medicines. In other words, without significant medical advantages, the scope and frequency of its medical applications will be limited.

Fig.2 The talk with Dr. Luo Pei, Director of Cardiovascular Medicine

After that, our team's interviewer introduced them to this year's BNU-China's project, and received positive and affirmative responses like "it is amazing if it can really control addiction", which may help promote the use of cannabis extract related drugs.

Social Education

Public activities-quiz and gifts

In order to better engage people in open dialogue, our team held an open activity on the campus of Beijing Normal University on October 1, 2022.

Fig.3 Outfield “Your Quiz on the Block”poster.

First of all, we wanted to reinforce the students' participation in the activity, so we designed “Your Quiz on the Block”. We improved the questionnaire distributed to the public in the early stage, by keeping the objective knowledge questions in the original questionnaire and adding a scoring mechanism in the format to stimulate the interest of the respondents. Respondents would receive feedback on the results in the form of scores and the correct answers to all questions after they finished answering. At the same time, in order to make our event more than a one-sided output of the participants, we prepared beautiful gifts - project brochure, "cannabis ‘vaccine’" game card which is adapted from a board role-playing game called "Werewolf kill", and let the roles associated with our project) .

Fig.4 "cannabis ‘vaccine’" game card adapted from a board role-playing game called "Werewolf kill".

Fig.5 The brochure of our project and related knowledge.

The response to our activities has been surprisingly positive. Moreover, students, teachers and staff were very pleasant to join and know more about synthetic biology. Participants also signed our posters with their opinions of our project like “I sincerely hope that synthetic biology and your projects will make a great contribution to the research and development of medicine!!!” and we finally succeeded in bringing iGEM and our program to a larger audience.

Online Charity Classroom

Fig.6 Online Charity Classroom held jointly by ten colleges.

During this online charity classroom, we held several exchange meetings and science lectures. Before the start of the science lecture, audience's geographic location and age, as well as collected information on what the students wanted to learn about, using a word cloud to give us a clearer idea of what they were interested in. Excluding the staff who organized the event, we ended up with 225 incoming students participating in our sessions, even attracting three students from Singapore and Australia.

Fig.7 The geographic distribution map of our audience.

Fig.8 The word cloud shows audience interest.

We record each lesson as a video and upload it to the Bilibili video platform after the lesson. In the popular science lecture, our team introduced "Modification and Application of Sensing Systems" in synthetic biology. The construction of biosensors, or biological sensing systems, is based on the first level of synthetic biology research, i.e., by mining the natural sensing elements that are sensitive to the target compounds and assembling them with the reporter elements that are suitable for reflecting the sensing intensity, the concentration and location of the target compounds can be sensed by reading and analyzing the signals generated by the reporter elements.

Sensing is an important part in our project. Our Pmr system senses Δ9-THC on the cell membrane and immediately secretes C-Phycocyanin as a reporter protein, so we have a deeper understanding of this part and therefore share our knowledge reserves. In addition, one of our team members taught the participating high school students about learning methods for deeper knowledge of high school biology, which will serve as a guidance for high school students.

Fig.9 The maps show audience interest and views of biology.

At the end of the course, we collected the contact information of the students participating in the course, and we randomly selected several students to give gifts. For all the students, we made an electronic version of the postcard as a souvenir.

Future Education - Experience manual

Fig.10 Teams that co-created this 2022 Handbook.

We encountered many of the problems that arise for new teams in the early stages. We believe that many problems are common, so we recorded many basic problems encountered in the process of team formation and competition, and gave our solutions. For example, we believe that when the experiment continues to fail, it should not be blindly repeated, but should first suspend the experiment, and constantly review each link with the teaching assistant and teachers, discuss and analyze the reasons for the failure, until the potential errors that may occur in each link are eliminated, and then the follow-up experiment is carried out. So we compiled this experience manual to provide reference and help for later teams, effectively stimulating the love of synthetic biology among students around us, lowering their threshold to participate in the competition, and promoting their understanding of iGEM events.

The details of our handbook are as follows.

 

Communication

Before we determined our project design, we participated in the online meeting up hosted by ZJU-China, CPU_China, HiZJU-China, ZJUintl-China, ZJUT-China. During this meetup, we heard many excellent and eye-opening project ideas from the teams as well as advanced synthetic biology techniques, which inspired us a lot. In addition, we learned the importance of project design and experimental design, and reviewed more in-depth information to prepare for the subsequent progress of the project.

Fig.11 iGEM Meeting up poster hosted by ZJU-China, CPU_China, HiZJU-China, ZJUintl-China, ZJUT-China.