EDUCATION

Educational in high school

Since we are a group of high school students, our project attracted a great number of classmates who became interested in iGEM and the aim and significance of our project. We agreed that participating in iGEM was a lot of fun. More importantly, we now have deeper understandings and insights on issues related to food safety. Moreover, the discussion on biological products is prevalent amongst high school students, which is why we have planned lectures on biology and online community activities to be held in the after-school programs of Chengdu Shude Highschool and clubs in Chengdu No.7 High School International.

Our lectures are based on 3 main areas. The first area is “biology and life”, which introduces basic knowledge on synthetic biology and its applications in real life regarding food safety issues. The second area is “food and biological products” which introduces Staphylococcus aureus(S. aureus) inhibition principle (the basis of our project) and discusses biological products and transgenic products. The final area focuses on introducing iGEM as an academic competition.

We hope that our sharing was effective and helpful, so we designed questionnaires for the participants in the lectures to receive feedback. We discovered that high school students are especially interested in one of the key aims in iGEM, which is“Local people solve local problems”.

When we received such feedback, we began to realize that teenagers are so interested in synthetic biology, and a new idea came into being: building a WeChat official account for science popularization!

Establishing the science popularization official account

When we prepared to build an official account, we found that there were many extreme and even wrong pseudoscientific views on the Internet. However, many elderlies believed deeply in such claims and teenagers were also confused by it. Therefore, we not only use this official account as a platform for sharing knowledge, but also hope to practice the social responsibility emphasized by iGEM by publishing correct popular science information.

We launched, along with Jilin_China United, the special science popularization of "20 whys" on official account to collect questions from non-biological professionals such as high school students, the elderly and office workers about GM, synthetic biology, and Life Sciences, and provide bilingual answers. （Click here to jump to HP page for details)

We also displayed the excellent topics of previous iGEM on official account. We hope that the public will be able to engage in synthetic biology as much as we do.

Community Food Safety Advocacy

As a project focusing on food safety, our inspiration comes from the daily life of community residents. It is within our responsibility and aim of the project to inform the community of food safety matters. We have learned through several ways that some families with senior citizens often find themselves in dispute with one another over the disposal of leftovers. Most elderlies have experienced food and resource shortages in the past, therefore do not wish to waste any leftovers. This results in the situation where leftover vegetables and meat are often refrigerated and eaten many times despite potential hygiene and safety issues which the younger generations are concerned about.

We have set up Food Safety Public Welfare Stations in the community center and came up with topics targeting the elderly, such as: "Eating overnight meals like this is equivalent to taking poison", "Food that has not spoiled may already be unsafe", "Food at home is safe to store this way", "How many pathogenic microorganismal hazards do you have in your kitchen".

These eye-catching topics caught the attention of many elderlies as well as some middle-aged and young citizens.