Section 1: Project’s Inclusivity
‘Since our group's project addresses body odor, the starting point of our project is to contribute to the society by assisting socially marginalized groups on their chronic troubles and distress. Our group believes that our project is a good way to include and save two major categorized marginalized crowds.
Category 1: Internal Embarrassment
The first is those who are reluctant to socialize because they have experienced the awkwardness of doing so. Through our global interviews, we found out that 63.4% of people with body odor are reluctant to face-to-face socialization due to body odor, and 49% of people with body odor avoid going into public places (e.g., gyms), attending public events (gatherings), or taking public transportation (e.g., subways). This demonstrates that the vast majority of people with body odor avoid social interaction because of it, and our program addresses the root of their social problems.
Category 2: External and Social Shaming
The second category is those who are socially outcasted, who are passively ignored or even actively avoided by the society because of their body odor. Since 51.8% of people with body odor have been uncomfortable with the judgements of others toward them, our project can also address their social problems at the root and avoid their social difficulties to the greatest extent possible.
Summary
Our program addresses the social difficulties of both groups to the greatest extent possible while providing them with a better choice for their skin, including the outcasted crowds by eliminating this problem from the root. Details seen here.
Section 2: Public Education
Not only are we focusing on the present inclusivity by our project conception, but we also expand our vision to the future of synthetic biology. After investigations, we have realized that the current threshold to study science is rather high, that it neglects certain groups of people.
Team KEYSTONE realized that financial abilities become one of the major barriers that blocks children from studying biology. Synthetic biology is an uprising field, and its opportunities are financially demanding. With the high cost of laboratory equipment, educational resources, and opportunities, multitudes of children in China’s rural areas do not have access toward biological studies.
Therefore, we have hosted two major activities, targeting the children in different areas that do not have much educational resources, hoping to include them into the future development of synthetic biology.
1. Biology lesson in Beijing’s Light and Love school
The Light and Love primary school locates in Shunyi, Beijing, being a non-profit & non-governmental educational charity organization. Light and Love provides education for disabled children, children in extreme poverty, and orphans from different places in China. After getting in contact with Light and Love, we decided to design a session introducing the basics of synthetic biology and its power to the children. This session introduces prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, the central dogma (replication, transcription, and translation), and some classic cases of bioengineering (e.g., expressing the green florescence protein in E. coli). We chose to use story-telling and dialogic language when teaching, to ensure that the content is not too profound for the children.
Joyfully, we encountered several little boys with major passion and curiosity, constantly asking questions in the content and requesting extension of the information given. When talking with them, we can vision their creativity, coming up with brilliant ideas of synthetic biology’s application.
Under our request, the students drew out their imagination of synthetic biology’s future. Their visions are beyond bacterial levels that we’ve introduced, expanding toward eukaryotic organisms. Some illustrated whales that can fly, crops that can seed themselves to save energy for farmers, and giant salamanders that can climb vertical surfaces like geckos. These sparkling imaginations gave us a clue of how creativity inspires future developments of this uprising field.
We are aware that one lesson does not suddenly cease the barriers and neglections of education and science, but we believe the mutual communication that we had with students in Light and Love can ignite the interest in biology within some children, that they would be able to walk into the field of science with pride.
2. A series of lessons with children in Gansu Renyuyuan
Renyuyuan s a non-profit organization that provides education for the children in extreme poverty and with mental and physical disabilities in Gansu’s rural areas. Due to financial and regional constraints, Renyuyuan cannot provide educational resources with high quality.
Therefore, we came up with the thought of doing our best to provide our maximized support for the students. Renyuyuan was extremely welcoming when they heard our thought. Coincidentally, they were hosting a summer program for the students, teaching lessons during the summer vacation. The teachers offered us three periods of lessons (40 min each) stretched within three days for biology.
Renyuyuan is in another province in China, while we are in Beijing. Hence, all lessons were online due to factual constraints.
To adapt the session length, we created a teaching plan more in-detail, introducing relatively in-depth information under identical concepts as the session in Light and Love. For instance, we described the cells as one and other factories functioning to survive and narrates the organelles as different departments to sustain it.
At the end of each session, we ask students to draw out what they have learned in the process, and the images below are some artworks we have received being sent by Renyuyuan’s teachers.
By teaching the three lessons, we hope to include these marginalized children from the edge of scientific education. Even though our level of knowledge is way too far from professional teachers, we still hope that these three lessons can lead the children through the threshold of education, creating an equalized future for science.
Conclusion
By promoting inclusivity by our product and via our actions, we hope to bring support for the excluded crowds in two major ways.
1. Aromata, ceasing social embarrassment and neglection
After realizing the social bothers of individuals with body odor, we wanted to make actions for a change. Their dilemma not only involves the biological concerns, but also socially being embarrassed and excluded. Hence, team KEYSTONE has created Aromata for the sake of inclusivity.
2. Team KEYSTONE, ceasing the barriers toward scientific education
The financial cost of learning biology is obvious for all team members, that the resources, equipment, and materials used during research is not affordable for some excluded children. Hence, as a team, we have also decided to reach out to these children with our full devotion, urging for a slight change of inclusivity with our actions.