National Science Popularization Day is a major science popularization event held by the Chinese government to promote science communication. A wide variety of activities will be held all over the country simply to popularize science in the last two weeks of September. To take such a great chance to spread the idea of synthetic biology, we reached out to the organizers of the National Science Popularization Day events in Changsha and got the chance to deliver a small lecture to primary-school students. In collaboration with our partner CSU_CHINA (link to the partnership page) , we delivered a 20-min course to introduce the basic principle and mindsets of synthetic biology to our audience. We also demonstrated a quick experiment to extract DNA from plums, thus allowing our audience to have a visual concept of what DNA looks like. At the same time, we also take this rare opportunity to introduce our project to the parents and harvest a lot of valuable opinions and advice.
Our mini-lecture “Bio-LEGO: An Introduction to Synthetic Biology” took place on September 25th in the Changsha youth palace. In this lecture, we first introduced the basic concepts and application scenarios of synthetic biology, therefore providing our audience with a broad picture of what synthetic biology is and how it may revolutionize our life.
Figure 1. Science lecture Poster and photos of the lecture
To help our audiences (7 to 12-year-old kids) understand how synthetic biology works, we described the biological parts as LEGO blocks. One can generate complicated structures and functions simply by combining parts or blocks with an engineering mindset. To further explain what biological parts really are, we then provided a brief introduction to the basic knowledge of DNA.
To stimulate our audiences’ interest, we also demonstrated how to extract DNA from plums simply with reagents available in the kitchen. Our audience participated in the experiment in group, and obtained visiable DNA extracts under our supervision.
Figure 2. Doing biology experiments with the children
At last, we had a Q&A session. By randomly interviewed several children on scene, we were excited to see that some of our audience may even come up with cool synthetic biology related ideas building on the knowledge they learned in our mini lecture. We also approached some of the parents of our audience at the scene. They generally believed that the activity was very meaningful and improved the children's interest in learning biology.
Figure 3. Interaction with the children
This activity has received extensive attention. The Science and Technology Dail, Red Net, Palm Changsha, and other media have reported on this activity and given positive comments on it.
Figure 4. Red Net media's report on this activity
To enable more people to know about synthetic biology, we also prepared a manual on synthetic biology, distributed it to the public, and introduced the basic idea of our project to them. People showed great interest in these materials. Some people also actively asked about the progress of our project and future application prospects.
Figure 5. Distribution of leaflets on synthetic biology
Figure 6. Specific content of the leaflet