Throughout the project, we scheduled several activities to provide new opportunities for broader communities to shape the ideas of synthetic biology. Many different lectures, activities, and materials were designed in order to fit the audience from various backgrounds and ages.
Here we divided people who participated in our activities into two categories: People who have medical or biology backgrounds and people who had not.
There are two activities included in this category: a five-week internship with Taipei American School (TAS) students and hosting a Synthetic biology lecture. These people already have basic knowledge about synthetic biology, hence plan our teaching material a little bit deeper.
Taipei American School is a high school that has the experience of participating in iGEM competition. Although they didn't enroll in the iGEM competition this year, they still came to our laboratory and learned about knowledge in synthetic biology and iGEM. This is a special and valuable experience for our team to make progress together with TAS students and learn from each other throughout the process. To ensure that students could gain practical knowledge and learn all the experimental skills, we arranged a well-knit schedule that covers all aspects of synthetic biology.
Our school- NYCU (Yang-Ming campus) is a medical university, almost all of our students have a biological background and many people were interested in synthetic biology and iGEM. This is why we host a lecture on our campus, sharing knowledge and information about synthetic biology.
There are three activities included in this category: Educational videos in native languages (Taiwanese Hokkien), podcast, and Instagram posts. The audience of these activities didn't have a relative background in this knowledge, therefore we had to simplify our words and make the knowledge easy to understand. Recording a video in Taiwanese Hokkien is also based on this idea since it is one of the most common languages used by the older generation. All of this information was shared on social media including YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram, hoping it could be easily accessed by a broader community.
It is a great encouragement to us when we learn that our educational activities bring real impact to the public and inspire students, elders and audience which is much more than we expected to dig in synthetic biology.
(Learned more information on the Education & Communication page)