Education

During our education, we chose students from Shanghai New Epoch Bilingual School as the audience of our educational activities and introduced the iGEM competition to them. This school did not have many students who have strong interests in biology or iGEM competition, which was shown by the small size of the AP Biology class, making itself an ideal audience for our education. Also, according to the school counselor, most students in this school did not have the experience of participating in iGEM before, making it an ideal audience for our education.

By introducing in-depth biological topics, the area of synthetic biology, current business trends, and career possibilities of this realm to students of various age groups, we effectively evoke students' yearning for biology and interest in synthetic biology. The reason behind these topics was our primary purpose and aspiration: to contribute to the area of synthetic biology, advance academic research, and benefit the community of iGEMers by introducing a new part to adjust RNA’s rate of degradation within cells and making their experiments easier. Thus, we wanted to expose synthetic biology to wider audiences and encourage their participation in iGEM.

Since our program's content has little to do with the general public, conducting educational activities was initially a difficult part for us. After serious consideration and brainstorming, we decided to put our educational emphasis on the popularization of synthetic biology, advertisement of iGEM, and interesting activities since these topics can effectively evoke high school students’ interests in a subject and can further promote and enrich the community of iGEM.

Then, we chose students from Shanghai New Epoch Bilingual School as our major educational target. First, we introduced the realm of synthetic biology to students from Grades 10 and 11, hoping to improve the public understanding of this subject and encourage them to consider it as a possible career choice. To attract our audiences and ensure the richness of our content, we included theoretical concepts, realistic applications, and the business perspective of synthetic biology. Thanks to the generous sharing of Ms. Yiming Dong, the co-founder of Xinxiu Tech Inc., and Mr. plus, the product manager of the bio company-Bluepha Inc., for giving us a reliable introduction of how business can relate to synthetic biology and summaries of several cutting-edge business projects with creative designs and amazing thoughts, which add credibility and uniqueness to our educational activity. As for students who are in Grade 9, we showed them several interesting biologies activities. This helps more students aware that biology is a subject with unlimited possibilities and countless interests other than the long definitions in their textbooks. Last but not least, we also made a speech about iGEM to increase its popularity among a wider audience and encourage more participation in future competitions. All these activities received great feedback from students and teachers and attracted several fans to our Official Account. Some students explicitly express their willingness to join iGEM in the coming year, and some students decided to take biology in their next academic year. This positive feedback is the best reward for all our efforts.

Figure 1. Introducing the field of synthetic biology and our project to junior high-school students at Shanghai New Epoch Bilingual School

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We chose the most commonly used social media in China, WeChat, as our major advertisement platform. By creating an Official Account, we regularly update posts about our program review, team introduction, and fun knowledge about synthetic biology. These contents are proven to be interesting and attractive by an increasing number of readers. This platform allows a wider public to know more about the iGEM community and the realm of synthetic biology.

Figure 2. The article we wrote on our Wechat official account for better spread of synthetic biology, the iGEM competition and our team