Communication

Overview: Our team's work in this part is to convey meaningful synthetic biology information to the public, including public account promotion, public lectures, online communication and offline science popularization. During the event, we cooperated with the LZU-HS-China-C team and BFSU-ICUnited. Based on the appropriate educational place and excellent copy writing ability provided by these two teams, we believe that through our educational activities, people can better understand synthetic biology and its future development prospects.

1. Official Account

Our target group is students who are interested in iGEM competition or synthetic biology and parents who need to know about the competition. Therefore, we have created an iGEM public account belonging to our team, which can be published online. So far, our team has released four issues of content, including introduction to iGEM competition, 7.17 meeting, our topic introduction and the basic introduction of synthetic biology. We hope to share our competition experience with others by issuing public accounts, and the follow-up feedback we have received is a certain amount of reading, which can prove the effectiveness of our education activities.

2.Lectures

At Beijing 101 Middle School and Qingdao No. 9 Middle School, we have held three lectures on synthetic biology and AP biology for many students who are interested in genetic engineering.

2.1 The First Lecture

In the first lesson, we mainly explained:
1. The cell surface display technology used in our experiment - that is, adding ice nucleation protein to produce chitosan oligosaccharide more efficiently.
2. The different levels of protein structure and the dehydration and condensation process of amino acids;
3. Characteristics of carbohydrate, lipid, protein and nucleic acid;
4. PCR principle;
5. The steps of plasmid extraction and the role of plasmid construction.
After class, many students actively asked questions and discussed more synthetic biology knowledge with us. Finally, we received feedback that this activity was very helpful to the tenth grade students, which gave them a preliminary understanding of the iGEM competition and confirmed their future learning direction.

2.2 The Second Lecture

In the second class, we used online meeting to enable more students to participate. In consideration of the time conflict, we recorded lessons for everyone to watch again. The content of this lecture includes:
1.The structure and characteristics of water molecules;
2.The bond between different kinds of polymers;
3.The benefits of chitosan oligosaccharide and its raw materials for production;
4.Application fields of genetic engineering.
As we changed the teaching method, more students asked questions and left messages in the comment area. Because we explained more details and principles on the basis of the first lecture, the students in Grade 10 fed back that it was also very helpful for their school biology courses.

2.3 The Third Lecture

The third lecture was held in Qingdao No. 9 Middle School. Our teaching content includes:
1.The history of synthetic biology;
2.Proposing the concept;
3.Research methods and tools;
4.Research direction.
After the lecture, our team members received the support and positive feedback from the students, and made quite a few students understand synthetic biology more completely.

3.Online Letter Writing With Left-behind Children

CTSS is a public welfare organization. Every volunteer will accompany the left behind children by sending letters online. These left behind children come from different cities in China, most of them are in remote villages, and their material conditions are far from cities. Most of us replied to the letter from primary school students, and a small number of them were junior high school students whose ages ranged from 6-14 years old, and they were at a stage of being very ignorant of synthetic biology. But in our long-term activities, when we meet junior high school students who are very interested in biology or children who are curious about life, genes, environment and even science fiction movies, we will tell them the relevance of these with synthetic biology by telling stories. Our goal and responsibility is not to teach them professional knowledge, but to take this opportunity to broaden their horizons, learn about synthetic biology and inspire their interests. Surprisingly, after several times of writing letters, we found that children expressed their strong interest in synthetic biology in their replies, some of them raised creative questions, and some of them expressed their understanding of synthetic biology in the form of paintings. We must thank CTSS organization for providing a platform. According to the feedback of these children, we think this is a very meaningful and successful educational activity.

4.Education Activities For The Elderly

The growing proportion of the elderly in China makes us pay attention to senior citizens. Considering that a large number of elderly people live alone, and their children may only visit them on weekends, we made a poster to give some precautions to the seniors and their children in nearby communities during the holiday. Our content includes diet, sleep and exercise, and we hope this can help them to have healthy living habits. After the activity, some people said that our posters and explanations were very useful to them, and they would pay more attention to their parents' dietary standards and health problems in the future.

References

https://www.canva.cn/design/DAFNygWzpQg/4lFqeZR2YULmuZ
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