Partnership

Introduction

The synthetic biology field is underdeveloped and unknown to most South Korean citizens. Even though the importance of synthetic biology has been proven, many are concerned about the safety and ethical problems that can be caused. While other countries take risks and see the positive aspects of synthetic biology, the South Korean public is pessimistic, resulting in the lack of technology and knowledge in synthetic biology. However, the Korean government came to an agreement to create the 한국 합성생물학 발전협의회 (Korea Synthetic Biology Development Council) on July 20th, 2022. As a result, our team knew that it was just the right time to develop and enlarge the synthetic biology field.

Biology in general is a challenging topic for high school students to approach outside of school as there are scarce amounts of activities for students to engage in. On the other hand, business, mathematics, robotics, and other popular subjects have a variety of competitions and activities that are available. Therefore, South Korea is not a suitable environment for students to learn synthetic biology.

From the outside, Korea might look like a country where everyone cooperates to achieve their goal. However, the reality is that everything is a competition with one another, stepping over each other to climb to the top. While countries such as China have meetings with different sections within China and therefore have a lot of opportunities to collaborate. Therefore, it is difficult to organize collaboration events in South Korea. However, Seoul Korea team attempted to host a biology debate competition, by collaborating with other iGEM teams in Korea.

Our goal at first was to create a synthetic biology debate competition targeting high school students, but we recognized that synthetic biology shouldn’t only be targeted to high school students, but possibly undergrads and university students. The synthetic biology debate competition was an immaculate opportunity for spreading synthetic biology to various groups of students in South Korea. By collaborating with other iGEM teams and extending the range of education, more students can learn synthetic biology in a proper environment. We sincerely hope that our attempts can increase the reputation of synthetic biology in Korea and stimulate the interest of students.

Meeting Records

7/25

As mentioned before, our team was originally going to do a collaboration with KoreaHS and target only high school students. However, after some discussion with the team, we were certain that it was a better choice to contact the university teams so that we can have a wider audience range. Also, sent the three companies a proposal for the competition already and two of the companies accepted our offer. Therefore, our team decided to contact the university teams through slack, email, and Instagram. We wrote a short description of the competition and persuaded them to join us.

8/6

In our team meeting on July 25th, our team introduced our idea to do a competition. Our team already finished creating a website through HTML coding and brought in funding from 3 companies. We explained that we want to expand the competition so that we can have a larger audience. Furthermore, we will be able to have higher-quality lectures from the professors of each university. Moreover, with a larger audience range, it will be convenient to spread word around for a greater number of participants the next year. All three teams were positive about the competition but still had to check with their teammates. Thus, the meeting ended on a note to check with their teammates and have a certain answer for the next meeting

8/8

We had a full meeting with all four teams together. The meeting started off formally introducing ourselves. All of the teams wanted to join us in creating the competition. We explained how there will be two competitions, one for high school and another for university students. We split up the parts for each team to do until the next meeting. Our team said we will mostly work on the high school competition part and help out with designing the poster, and gather judges for both competitions.

8/15

Team KUAS joined the meeting with a competition plan of how the university competition was going to work out.

We also shared our plan for the high school competition based on the proposal that was written for different companies.

8/22

As the competition date at that time was set for late August to early September, all three teams were eager to work to successfully manage to create the competition. In order to gather the maximum capacity of participants, we planned to use two methods to promote the competition. The first was to use social media. Due to the fact that about 4.7 billion people use social media, we knew that it was an effective way to spread the word about the competition. Also, as we created a website, people were able to view the website through social media posts. The second method was to create a poster. The poster had to be aesthetically pleasing, grabbing the attention of many people. The poster was planned to be posted in different school hallways, and university boards. Therefore, the audience is able to look at the competition information in one sight or take pictures of the poster. As it was our job to create the posters, we had to come up with the idea and finalize the poster as soon as possible to move on to the next step.

8/29

Our team came up with an idea for the poster, a cell structure working. The fun and unique poster were perfect for the competition. We sent a basic reference of the idea we were looking at.

Every other team gave us feedback and gave more ideas of the content that was going to be inside the poster.

9/6

In our meeting, we discussed the lecture, judge, and other materials needed for the competition. With only 2 weeks left until the competition, only one judge was confirmed for the whole competition. For the lecture, we decided to have one person from each team 새 find someone suitable. At this point in the meeting, we had the first draft of the poster. We also discussed about the poster and things to change or add.

9/8

The poster was finalized at this stage. We printed the posters and sent them to each school quickly so that they can be posted. There were already a few high school teams that registered for the competition.

9/12

The registration for high school ended. A total of 21 teams registered, but 18 turned in the report on time. Our team started grading the report with the rubric posted previously. Through the reports, we were able to realize how much research every participant put in as they had to research both sides of the topic.

In the meeting, we prepared for the upcoming competition. We started creating cue sheets for both the high school section and the university section. We discussed about how all of the judges were confirmed for both sections. We prepared google slides for the competition

9/19

Before the competition date, we rehearsed the ISBC competition and continued creating the slide for the lecture. Among 18 teams that submitted their reports on time, after thorough consideration, we selected six final teams and emailed them. Lastly, we invited university professors who could provide the synthetic biology lecture during the ISBC competition.

9/24

The ISBC competition was hosted on September 24. At first, high school and university students attended lectures at the same zoom meeting. We also introduced the iGEM competition and our project to participants. The ISBC competition ended successfully, while “SFS Team 4” won the trophy for the high school league. Through this collaboration with Korean university teams, we realized that students could learn synthetic biology in a more accessible way.

Conclusion

By collaborating with Sogang_Korea, Uincheon, and KUAS_Korea, we successfully co-hosted an international biology competition. Partnership with the Korean university team allowed us to spread the knowledge on synthetic biology to a wider range of audience. Throughout the competition, we were delighted to provide a meaningful and beneficial experience to high school students and university students. As the ISBC was the first official synthetic biology competition in South Korea, our team believes that our attempt is the cornerstone for the development of synthetic biology in South Korea. Also, building upon our experience with ISBC, the Seoul_Korea team will continuously strive to spread the significance of synthetic biology. In the future, we hope more students and researchers to receive education on synthetic biology.