Public Engagement
To spread the knowledge of parasitic disease and synthetic biology to more people in the society, we used various methods to go beyond the lab and go into the society. Combining online and offline methods, inside the university and on the internet, we achieved our public engagement goal and we are planning to continue doing so after the competition.
We have built our own accounts for synthetic biology team and iGEM team members from our university on Twitter, TikTok and Wechat. We focus on wechat account more cause there are more people around us are using Wechat as their daily communication app. We used these accounts to post our work, our team and the newest updates about synthetic biology to make these information spread to more people.
We kept updating our Wechat account every week, whether the context was about our work progress or not. We kept trail on our work on our account and post summary for new articles about synthetic biology to catch up on the newest trend in this industry and make our account active. We have decided to continue working on these accounts after the competition and continue to use these accounts for later years.
Online lecture stream
This year, together with NAU_China and other teams from China, our ICII collaboration used online stream as a form to communicate our project and our work. We consider this more than a online meeting or communication among iGEMers who are more or less familiar with these relatively professional topics we are talking about. Since we were using bilibili as a platform, live streaming as the form, we decided to make more people become a part of our discussion. Most of bilibili users are young people like us or even younger, who are interested in new form and new things rather than traditional lecture. Therefore, we used a virtual figure to make our stream more appealing. To avoid the topic being way too professional and too hard to understand for those who are not major in biology science or medicine, we chose parasite and parasitic disease as our topic. What we want to give to the audiences is the knowledge of parasitic disease, the awareness of preventing it and basic knowledge about synthetic biology and CRISPR-Cas system. We have had interactions with audiences through chat box and had a great time for this 1 hour stream.
Debate competition in collaboration with CSU Debate team
People always say that talking to different people is a great way to gain different sides of views, we consider this same in our work. To know about more about what we can improve or what we can do, we decided to talk to more students in our school to know about their opinion. Moreover, debating is a great way to discovering potential problems and discovering new angles for us to review our work. Therefore, we held a debate competition in collaboration with school debate team from our university, Central South University. Debaters and audiences are from different majors including Law School, School of Chemical Industry, Business School, School of Civil Engineering, Medical School and so on.
The topic of this debate is “ If you are a residents in high risk area of echinococcosis, would you rather choose traditional diagnostic method or new in vitro diagnostic method?” Debaters gave their interesting and valid opinions on both sides. The main problems they focused on were the cost and the accuracy, which were also what we have put into our consideration. The debate used the same form as a TV show called Qipashuo, audiences can vote for the side they are standing with every round after the debaters finished debating. After the debate, we held an Q&A session for audiences to answer their questions. The debate was very interesting, audiences and iGEMers all had a great time. This debate did not just gave us a opportunity to gain new opinions, but also spread biology and synthetic biology knowledge to those who do not have much opportunity to know about these, it feels so good for us to learn from each other.
Other offline public engagement activities
As we mentioned in Education part, this year, we had a partnership with NUDT_China and with them, we attended the science publicity week activity held by Changsha government. Besides giving lectures to children, we also made brochures and handed them to both children and adults and everyone who came to us to make more people know about what synthetic biology is and what synthetic biology can achieve.
Education
HighSchool Education Overview
High school students are familiar with biology, but they are very new to the concept of synthetic biology. In order to introduce them to the concept and application of synthetic biology, we went to the Changjun High School to deliver a presentation for this project. We introduced them to the two core components of the project, echinococcosis and molecular diagnostics with CRISPR-Cas12a. Through our presentation they were able to deepen their knowledge of parasites and learn more about a new diagnostic method.
Intention
Our presentation is aimed at teenagers in southern China, who have little knowledge of echinococcosis as the disease is mainly found in the pastoral areas of north-western China. We hope that this presentation will enhance the knowledge of the high school students about echinococcus and echinococcosis. In addition, the presentation on CRISPR-Cas12a will broaden the high school students' knowledge in molecular biology. Finally, through feedback from the participants, we could improve our project.
Content
PART I:synthetic biology&IGEM
Firstly, we introduced the definition of synthetic biology, its origins, and application. Then we introduced what the IGEM competition is and some excellent projects of IGEM, as well as a brief explanation of our last year's IGEM project. Through this part, the students gained a basic understanding of synthetic biology and became interested in the IGEM competition.
PART II:Parasite&echinococcosis
In this section, we introduced the concept of parasites, the structure and life history of echinococcus, as well as the distribution, prevalence factors, susceptible groups, pathogenesis and treatment of echinococcosis. We then asked the students to divide into two groups and use what they had learned to design experiments to solve the diagnosis of echinococcosis. After the discussion, the students shared their ideas with us and we also introduced the diagnostic methods used in Our project.
PART III:CRISPR/Cas
In the final section, we present knowledge about CRISPR/Cas system. We first explained the concepts of molecular biology and genetic engineering as an introduction, after which we explained the history, origins, results and mechanism of CRISPR/Cas system, and finally we introduced the applications of this technology in various fields. Through our lectures, we stimulated the high school students' interest in CRISPR/Cas technology and even in synthetic biology.
Feedback and Prospect
We invited students to fill in the questionnaire as feedback on the project.
The participants who filled out the questionnaire were 9 males and 3 females, all between the ages of 15-16.
The statistical results of the questionnaires were as follows.
- Before this presentation, 16% of the people knew something about echinococcosis, and the rest had never heard of it.
- 92% of people had no patients with echinococcosis around them, and only 8% of people had 1 patient with encapsulated worm disease around them.
- Most people thought the way to prevent echinococcosis was vaccination and strengthening the handling and control of animals such as dogs and cattle in endemic areas.
- Before this presentation, 58% of people had knowledge of molecular diagnostic methods.
- 25% thought the most common diagnostic method was imaging diagnosis, 25% thought laboratory diagnosis, and 50% thought pathology diagnosis.
- Through this presentation, 100% of people understood the life history of the
echinococcus.
- Through this presentation, 83% of people learned about CRISPR/Cas molecular diagnostic technology.
The questionnaire survey showed that the presentation was effective and we have improved the content of the next presentation based on the opinions of the high school students who participated in the survey.
Special Education Overview
Children in special education schools have difficulty receiving all aspects of social science popularization due to various forms of sensory impairment. But children's abundant imagination can form vivid images in their minds. In order to popularize the concepts of life science and synthetic biology to them, we gave them a lecture. This allows them to deepen their understanding of the life sciences and learn the basic principles of synthetic biology.
Intention
Our presentations are aimed at visually impaired children who know very little about synthetic biology. Because it is difficult for them to understand the relevant knowledge in a conventional way, and there are few relevant teams to introduce them to the relevant knowledge of the life sciences. We hope that this talk will improve children's basic understanding of the basic principles of synthetic biology and enrich children's knowledge. Finally, with their feedback, we can improve our project.
Content
PART I: Life Sciences
Firstly, we combed through biology with the kids. By guiding children to think about everyday life, they look for reasons for the difference between lives. This interests students in the life sciences and facilitates our next introduction to synthetic biology.
PART II: synthetic biology&IGEM
Firstly, we introduced the definition of synthetic biology, its origins, and application. Then we introduced what the IGEM competition is and some excellent projects of IGEM, as well as a brief explanation of our last year's IGEM project. Through this part, the students gained a basic understanding of synthetic biology and became interested in the IGEM competition.
PART III：In the final section, we work with the children to imagine and synthesize a wide range of applications of biology. Synthetic biology can solve the problems around it and how. And we also pay attention to ethics for children's wild ideas. Which applications of synthetic biology can improve human life and which are not ethical. And at the same time deepen our thinking about ethics.
Feedback and Prospect
We asked individually about some of the kids' feedback on our presentations. And solved their problem with synthetic biology.
At the beginning of new semester, there comes thousands of freshmen in our campus along with some of their families. At the welcome activity, our team members from school of Life Science have promoted synthetic biology and iGEM to these freshmen, they showed great interest to this new area related to what they are going to study, some of them also said that they want to be an iGEMer in the future.
Parents of freshmen are learning about the iGEM competition
CSU_CHINA iGEMer is introducing iGEM to new students
iGEM & CSU_CHINA Roll Screen
