Communication

1. OnlinePrimary School Education

To impact the public, the most effective method is to implant the basic concept of synthetic Biology, or Biology in general, to people’s mind at a young age. As a result, we decided to step into classrooms to present knowledge sharing courses in an effervescent mood to introduce primary school students with Biology face-to-face. Unfortunately, COVID-19 broke out in our city, leaving us no choice but to record videos for primary schools to play. We created various illustrations introducing the history of producing indigo dyes in ancient China as well as Western society, including Egypt where indigo dyes first emerged. Then we briefly presented our project, focusing on using bacteria to produce dyes. We showed pictures from results of our experiments such as dyed clothes, simplified data and so on. We sent our recorded video to The Affiliated Primary School of Tsinghua University. We hope that through our effort, the video can motivate the younger generation to pay more attention to Biology, and even seek a future career in it, contributing to the development of life on Earth.

2. OnlineMiddle School Education

Despite the basic impactful sessions, we also need to spread our innovative ideas in a more technical way to the mature public who already understand much about Biology in order to actually bring new insights. As a result, under the influence of pandemic, we recorded another longer video for middle school students. We created slides illustrating our motivation of project, history of production and dyeing process of ancient dyes across the world, results of our questionnaire about public reaction to current dye market, complete process of our experiment and conclusions of our solutions aiming at creating environmental-friendly dyes using synthetic Biology. Since the audience are middle school students, we tried to connect our perspectives with contents in their textbooks, introducing several extra innovation points. We sent our recorded video to Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Wudan No. 3 Middle School, Experimental Middle School Affiliated to Sichuan Normal University, The Second Affiliated Middle School of Beijing Normal University as well as The Affiliated Middle School of Tsinghua University. We hope that through our effort, the video can expand teenagers’ understanding in Biology, synthetic Biology in specific, and further intrigue them to explore the world of life in their own various ways.

3. Offlinecommunity information sharing session

After the wave of pandemic, we searched for chance to share our reflections with the public face-to-face in order to exchange ideas and gain insights. After discussion, we finally decided to hold a public information session in the culture exchange center in local community together with Nanjing_NFLS, Worldshaper_Nanjing, Worldshaper_NJBIO and Nanjing_Chinaon October 5thin Lanyuan, Xuanwu District, Nanjing. In addition to introducing our project, we introduced knowledge about synthetic Biology, the implementation of synthetic Biology in environment protection, implementation of synthetic Biology in fermentation and future prospects of synthetic biology in the market. By introducing synthetic Biology knowledge to the public, we aim at disseminating the importance of it to our daily life, including health, agriculture, food and material, as well as the awareness of environmental protection.