For the education part of our project, we simply divided our activities into online and offline. For the online part of our project, we first drew a xxxxpage long comic book that combined synthetic biology knowledges into a story, which can easily be understood and absorbed by not only the general public but also kids from even elementary schools. For wider influence, we typically and intentionally selected the basic synthetic biology concepts and terms for our content, which fits a broader audience compared to the ones that contain in-depth knowledges. Besides, we’ve also started a WeChat channel that posts plentiful synbio related contents. For one, our channel has a specific section for daily synthetic biology terms and definitions. We tend to build a sense of daily learning experience through small tasks for our audience. It not just dividing a huge concept like synthetic biology into a simple word a day, but also makes a sensational progress if one does keep on track every day. Meanwhile, we’ve also made progresses that cater to people for in-depth learning. Translating advanced synthetic biology articles and journals was one thing that we did for people who want to be up-to-date in synbio but at the same time have difficulties in reading English. We’ve also translated relatively short and simple synbio test books for domestic students who are interested in this field for further learning.

For the offline part of our education activity, we held lectures to introduce synthetic biology mainly to middle school students. We start of by giving synthetic biology’s different definitions to show what is synthetic biology in multi-perspectives. Then we give some of the most common synbio applications to inform them that synbio isn’t something far away from our life. Finally we poses a few of synbio’s current concerns and challenges to encourage them to do further researches and be the one that potentially solve the problem and wins Nobel Prize.

Our education of synthetic biology is mainly acomplished through two approaches: offline presentation and online publication of lively explanation of terminologies in synthetic biolgy and the application of which in our project and in people's daily lives.

Taking account of the recent pandemic in Shanghai and other cities in China, our team believed we should center upon online activities to garantee our audience's safety, abide by government's appeal in adopting preventative policies and ensure the publicity of our media work projects.

We registrated our wechat media platform in late June in taking account of the time needed to gather viewers and subscribers to laid the foundation of our subsequent activities. Our social media platform is comprised of three major categories, rudimentary explanation of synthetic biology concepts, updates and summaries of the latest progress in the field, and lively illustrations intended to interwine amusement with entertainment.

Each day, we will post a simple explanation of a synthetic biology terminology explanation into our platform. The explanation can be understood without prior academic knowledge in biology because our team avoids using complicated vaocabulary in the process and provides analogies in real life setting to help build the background. Through this process, we aim to bring more attention into the field of synthetic biology and to our cause of the painfree urinic acid detection system. One of our viewers commented that since each of our explanation passage is relatively straightforward and comprehensible, she felt that gap of knowledge acquisition had been largely shortened. "There is no better way of arousing one's interest in a discipline than to introduce him/her to the knowledge proper." Statistically, a month from our construction of our Synthetic biology vocab corner, our follower numbers has rised from XXX to XXX. Nevertheless, we are not content with providing our viewers with the basics only.

Another section of online platform provides summaries and updates of recent research in SYnthetic biology. Our team realize that some of our readers may possess a more profound knowledge archive and would like to dig deeper into the mysteries in this field. To provide a guidance for their upcoming exploration, we provide an insight into how biology is applied in real world setting and how abstract concepts and come into play when tackling real life hassles. We also include the citation of the articles at the bottom so the ones who are interested in the details can directly locate the corresponding research. Our purpose for the establishment of this session is to reveal the ways how synthetic biology interwined with other disciplinaries and how seemingly intangible ideas are solidified all around us. We are hoping that readers who profession in fields different from biology can find a way to relate themselves to a discipline that appeared to be distant from them.

Lastly, we have been keeping the code to our online forum and meeting session updated on this platform. We want to gather people with similar interests and passion to discuss their reward in their learning process and provide unqiue insights to incorporate into the comic book we are planning to publish( the description of which will be included in latter paragraphs. ) Lastly, in the hopes of constructing a more inclusive and interactive platform, our team posts polls and let the audience have a say in the upcoming topics in our columns. Anonymous suggestion boxes are also establish to receive comments and (more importantly) constructive criticism to refine our project. Till now, we have received up to XXX comments in our suggestion boxes and made solid revisions accordingly.

Later in July, when the pandemic has faded and the policies loosen in China, we began to host offline educational sessions in our scools and start expanding our influence through inperson contacts. Although we already collected a mass amount of quantitative data and some qualitative response through online distribution of questionaires and surveys using our social groups, we wanted to confirm that our collected data can accurately reflect and reprsent real life health concerns and real world obstacles that prevent people from maintaining a healthy diet and increase their risk of disease onset at an earlier age. We conducted our offline acticities in three dimensions: school gathering and forum with onstreet booths and pamphlet spreading.

We started by influncing the community and people around us. Not only did we have members located all around China, scattered in different cities, but we also have team members currently studying abroad in the United States. Fortunately, all of our materials are bilingual, so we can reuse the materials in different school to suit our purposes. We started by organizing sharing sessions to gather schoolpals interested in teh field of synethtic biology or introduce people whose profession is related to this topic to join into our dicussion. Once we gathered enough particpatants, we expand our activities from pure sharing into the form of a intellectual salon. We invite students to conduct presentations in turns to discuss their discoveries of the way synthetic biology take parts in all our lives.

We invites not only the students who major in STEM, but also students form other cirriculums like Public Policies, indoor designs, and arts. The process in acknowledging how the seemingly distant subject can be interwined in multiple subject is extremely rewarding. Because we relied on interactive model and encourage questions of all kinds, most of our participants find our session extremely helpful in helping them navigating through the sophisiticated concepts and lowering the benchmark for stduents new to this field develop a rudimentary knowledge base. In XXXX school, a few students are even inspired to focus their graduation capstone projects on topics related to synthetic biology. To the non-senior students, we encourage them to keep an open mind in contacting with previously unfamiliar concepts and terms. Though the topic of synthetic biology sounds intimdating to people at the first glance, through our effort in simplification and clarification, our team managed to laid a foundation to those originally unfamiliar with the subject.

In conclusion, not limiting to a certain grade of students, we sought the opportunity to convey our ideas in the face of more people through the biology club, acting as a medium to connect things, of the local school. Encountering a large number of kindred spirits who held an earnest and chaste mind to learn in-depth biology, we specifically described our project to them. We talked about the inspiration for doing this project since the current situation of uric acid was slightly unpromising and would readily lead to negative health conditions and some inconveniences for people. Moreover, we further discussed our genetic circuit for detecting uric acid, which was made up of three functional components: detection, amplification, and luminescent system. With detailed information, the students were more likely to understand the project we were now engaged in.

Due to our limitations in social circles and human resources, the majority of our followers are teenagers and young people. To ensure our project extend beyond the age boarders and to find way to make our educational program more inclusive to other demographic populations, we conducted random interviews on the street and spread pamphlets to help increase our publicity. Below is our attached PDF version of the pamphlet, it is composed of three subsections: the quick introduction of our team and its causes, to spread knowledge regarding synthetic biology and design a painless urinic acid detection mechansim. We listed our social media wechat platform and provide a detailed illustration book guide to help overcome the challenges elder users might face when learning in an online environment. Though pamphlet distribution process has faced major challenges and produced less effect than on-campus activities, we managed to still capture the attention of some people.

Nevertheless, what adult users seek in our educational program is more to broaden their horizon, accquire fundamentary knowledge in biology, and expand their vaocbulary bases. With these intentions, adult users ar more interested in our word of the day section than our research summary sections. On few survey forms, adult viewers adviced that we incorporate more memorable storyline or anecdotes when describing the development process of the utilization of synthetic biology in certain fields to create a deeper impression and add fun to their reading. Also, we acknowledged the potential differences in educational background and add in an bibliography of basic terms that we omitted in previus sections. Below is an example article we posted on our media platform and the revisions we made according to viewers' suggestion.

In order to further propagate the specific application and important concepts of our project, our group also reached out to a senior high school in Guangzhou. It is genuinely believed in our group that enabling people in the local community, especially the youth, to understand and harbor a general picture of synthetic biology and the reason for designing a novel kind of uric acid detector, its operational skills, and how the uric acid detector function in our daily lives is virtually significant.

For our lecture with 10th graders, besides briefly introducing them to the essence of IGEM competition, such as what it is responsible for and what should we do during the long-term process, we also longed for imparting to them the basic principles and knowledge of synthetic biology to them. Attempting to explain the process of the replication, transcription, and translation of DNA, we made use of a flow chart and interesting analogies to provide them with a precise understanding of this complicated progress. For example, we compared the process of rRNA translating information from DNA to the progress of manufacturing and packaging chocolates from a particular factory. We hoped such kind of simplified description could help them better grasp the central ideas. Furthermore, we explained some technical terms that are frequently used in synthetic biology in plain languages, such as “operon” and “primer”. The academic foundation rendered students who knew nothing about synthetic biology before to the threshold of this compelling field.

After exemplifying our project, we basically encouraged those students who were also interested in discovery and research to participate in the IGEM competition. By presenting the essence, the central focus of the IGEM competition, and the way to progressively perform their work, we offered them a clear outline of how to take part in and further create a wonderful and appealing project by themselves. At the end of the lectures, the students were able to deftly recite the whole circuit of our uric acid detector and even some specific elements like hucR, which uric acid molecules attached to, and hucO. Asking the students for their comments or some feelings about our lecture and our project, we obtained some encouraging thoughts that some students were virtually motivated by our introduction to engage in IGEM competition next year or prepare for relative biological research projects. From this valuable opportunity, we also learned the known and unknown things of our community, which served as a beacon to better regulate and perform our future human practices and formulate research plans.

View CCIC PDF

To get in touch with other outstanding teams participating in iGEM, our group has attended the 2022 CCIC, the Conference of China iGEMer community. We were looking forward to communicating with other teams with the same or similar topic or research direction and listening to suggestions from iGEM advisors or significant companies in synthetic biology. We also hope that through this conference, our project and team can become more eye-catching and let more people pay attention to the social contribution brought by our project.

During the CCIC, our team contacted attending teams and briefly communicated our experiences and topics. By sharing our subject, our team cooperated with other groups and gave each other warm feedback. We have also participated in several small lectures with official people from iGEM, giving us essential knowledge and advice to rearrange and approve our project. We listened to the safety conference held by ShanghaiTech University, which is also the organizer of the 2022 CCIC. The conference provided important information about the ideas to make our project beneficial to the broader society. The difference between Biology Security and Biology Safety, and how to bring essential educational influences to our project.

One of the captains of our team, Gracie To, presented as a judge in the CCIC. She reviewed all the teams' presentations and special awards entries with other professional judges. This experience was not only about using her technical skills to share statements with reference meanings but also for our team to learn from each other and fill in the gaps. Being a chosen judge was proof of affirmation.

By attending the CCIC, we obtained a lot of important information, which helped us stabilize our platform and make early changes before everything went too late. After understanding the projects of other teams, we can better arrange the cooperation with some teams -- based on similar research directions or contributions to the same vision of society. By making presentations in front of other participating teams, we accumulated goodwill with other judges and relevant people, which is conducive to our future publicity and cooperation work, and also paved the way for our future human practice.

Our team also held a student conference called “Night Talk” with some other Chinese high school iGEM teams, which was a marvelous opportunity for us to unite different fantastic student groups. We shared our project topic and research progress with them and gained valuable advice. We have met multiple difficulties during our team progress, for instance, human practice, data collection, and project promotion. Each team has its ideas about the iGEM competition and brilliant problem-solving methods. It was a very rewarding meeting for the teams participating in the competition for the first time. Under our leadership, the conference went very smoothly and brought great experience and participation to all the teams. Before this conference, we had many problems and shortcomings in human practice, but by absorbing the strengths of others and listening to sound suggestions, we solved these problems perfectly. At the end of the night, we received many compliments and cooperation invitations from the participating teams.

View Illustration Book PDF

The idea of our illustration book derived from teh Youtube Channel Ameoba Sisters. During some of the students' initial contact with biology, we relied on eye catching visualization and vivid explanation of concepts we found tedious and diffcult to comprehend. Our book serves as one of the attractions to encourage people to focus on the "fun" in synthetic biology.

We wanted to inspire our viewers to not see our contents as a simple lecture, but more as an engaging activity where one submerge oneself completely into the context of knowledge and try on the approach of imagining oneself as a part of the major movement. To be specific, in our illustration book, the main characters are designed as scientists accidentally entering the world of microbiology and transition into ribosomes that observes the DNA replication process closely.

During the sessions we hold after the creation of the illustration book, we tried to apply similes and analogies when explaining a difficult concept to our audiences. We believed that concrete images are easier to grasp than abstract languages. We also encourage audience to come up with their own interpretations of the situation. Like the atmosphere we constructed in teh illustration book using interactive dialogues and bright contrasting colors, we wanted our upcoming activities to be filled with joy and enjoyment.

View Cook Book Recipe PDF

With the purpose of furthering the investigation and application of our IGEM project and raise people's awareness of disease prevention , we decided to introduce the concepts of Low-purine diet to people in Shanghai. We believe that connecting synthetic biology with aspects in people's daily lives will help illict interest in our cause and appeal to more people in our community. Terminologies and research outcome presented in digital platform may be inaccessible to the middle aged and elder generation, thus we decided to approach the topic from a perspective familiar to all: food.

For our lecture in a local club about health, we introduce and explain the topic that a low-purine diet is an eating plan that limits foods with high purine. Purines are a natural substance found in some foods. Purines aren’t all bad, but you want to avoid high amounts. When your body digests purine, it produces a waste product called uric acid. We also used some charts and data to show a buildup of uric acid crystals in the joints can cause certain health issues. For instance, the main ones are kidney stones and a type of arthritis known as gout. The purpose of a low-purine diet is not to fully avoid purines. Instead, the goal is to manage how much purine you consume. Below, you will find what types of food and drink to avoid and limit. It helps to learn how your body responds to foods that contain purine. Next, we taught them what foods and drinks contain purine. What they should try to avoided and some charts that show supporting data about patients' improved health outcome after eating a low-purine food. All of those information was included in our PPT and rendered adults and children who knew nothing before some parts about the synthetic biology.

Additionally, to correspond to the current pandemic circumstances, we incorporate a section about food storage and how to maintain a relatively health diet during lockdown. During the recent shanghai pandemic, we noticed that a lot of people relied on can food and instant noodle as their main dietary choice.

After showing our projects several times to different kinds of people within different ages. Some of them talked to us that their family doctor recommended them follow a low-purine diet, but they didn’t know the reason until they heard our lecture. After the lessons, some people were excited to show their notes, including Our delivered knowledge can be effective on people with kidney stones, hyperuricemia and other disease caused by irregular eating habits.

To further test out the effect of our lecture, we hosted arranged two sets of lectures with one intentionally leaving out the discussion of drinking water on health outcomes and with one concluding with that content. Then, we observed the leftover plastic water bottle and the remaining amount of water. Through comparison, we found that most water bottles from the lecture without the disucssion of water's effect on health were left unopen or merely touched but after the other lecture, we found significantly fewer leftover water bottles( which implied that people might take them back home or finished them and threw them into the trashcan).

At last, we printed out extra paperback version of our recipe and our illustration book to distribute to those we cannot access the digital version. The digitial version is available at our wechat social media platform, people can get access to the files with an autoreply mechanism we designed which our bot can send out versions automatically responding to keywords as illustration book and recipe.