Education & Communication
Our education activities included posting posters and rolling banners, creating the team’s WeChat Official Account, designing an original game, editing a song, giving a mini-lecture for younger-age kids and we also set up an online shop to sell our derivative for promotion as well as fundraising.
Below is the mindmap of the whole education activities:
Fig. 1 Mindmap of Pepsick’s Education
1. Poster & Rolling Banner
Fig 2. Some posters we posted on Instagram and Little Red Boo
We designed some posters, including the introduction of our team, sales promotion of our peripheral products, the introdction of antibacterial peptide and its application. They were published on several social media platforms, like instagram and little red book, respectively.
Fig 3. Design drawing and finished product of the rolling banner
After that, we also made a rolling banner to advertise in the square and elevator entrance of a office building to attract more people to pay attention to our project and our team.
2. WeChat Official Account
Fig 4. Screenshots of articles we published on ourWeChat Official Account
We also set up a WeChat Official Account as an important communication channel with the public in China. So far we published a total of 8 articles. Each article is aimed at different topics.
Our first articles introduced our research topic, team name, and logo. After that, we published some articles on the introduction of antibacterial peptides, the use of antibiotics, and how the work of antibacterial peptides compares with antibiotics et al. We would like to lead our followers to understand our project and gather more knowledge about antibacterial peptide gradually. We also wish the public could feel the charm of synthetic biology and pay more attention to it.
Regarding the impact, some of these articles had been read by more than 500 people. There are more and more followers, now our WeChat Official Account has 400+ followers.
3. Puzzle Game: "My Biological Warfare Team"
Fig. 5 The puzzle sheets and how we played
Introduction
In order to promote synthetic biology and our antibacterial peptide, “Pepsick”, our team developed a puzzle and interesting game called "My Biological Warfare Team". Players can arrange their own biological fleets in the process of playing, and learn biological knowledge from them.
Equipment needed
Two group strategy maps, whiteboard, 50 questions, two answer bells.
Rules of the game
Two sides: Red country and Blue country.
Victory goal: Deploy your own biological fleet map. Get the right to attack by answering the questions correctly and destroy the enemy's fleet.
Fleet deployment: Both sides deploy their biological fleets on their own square map of 11*11. There are seven warships in each team: pep, bio, anti, synth, piscis, pepsick, medicine. All warships will be deployed in the battle map. Each warship can only be arranged horizontally and vertically. Each letter corresponds to a grid. Each grid can only have one letter.
Attention⚠: When both parties deploy their own fleets, if one side peeks at the deployment of the other side, the peeking side is directly regarded as a failure. The deployment of both sides should restart.
Fig.6 The fleet (11*11 strategic map and warships ) and players’ animation roles ( Red and Blue)
Answer rule: Both sides have their own rings. The side who presses the bell first gets the right to answer the question. The host will give questions. Players think of the answer, press the bell. If one side answers correctly, the side can get the right to attack. If the answer is wrong, the game continues. Group communication can be carried out during thinking. If one side gets the right to answer the question and the other party answers first, the score will be counted as the party with the right to answer the question. Different questions indicate different attack times.
Attack rule: There will be blank strategic maps of both sides on the whiteboard. When attacking, the attacker can choose the grid coordinates of the opponent he wants to attack, such as (B, 8). If the warship of the other side is attacked, the host will draw an "X" on the blank map of the other side. If there is no attack, the host will draw "O". If you get an "X", this warship is regarded as "destroyed".
Specific examples:
Fig 7. Sample fleet (the left is Red Country and the right is Blue Country)
Fig 8. Sample game scene
Here are some examples of our questions for users
1. True or false questions (2 attacks per question)
1. When Xiao Ming caught a cold, he found penicillin at home and used it to treat himself. (B)
    A. True   B. False
2. We should use antibiotics rationally according to the guidance of doctors. (A)
    A. True   B. False
3. The abuse of antibiotics will promote the production of super bacteria. (A)
    A. True   B. False
4. The abuse of antibiotics will not cause allergies. (B)
    A. True   B. False
5. Our unreasonable use of antibiotics will lead to bacterial resistance. (A)
    A. True   B. False
6.Antibiotics are beneficial and harmless. (B)
    A. True   B. False
7. Penicillin is an antibiotic. (A)
    A. True   B. False
8. Cephalosporins are antibiotics. (A)
    A. True   B. False
9. Amoxicillin is a cephalosporin antibiotic. (B)
    A. True   B. False
10. Antibiotics cure viral colds. (B)
    A. True   B. False
11. The phenomenon of antibiotic allergy is manifested as rash, redness, difficulty in breathing, and even anaphylactic shock. (A)
    A. True   B. False
12. An antibacterial peptide is a kind of polypeptide substance. (A)
    A. True   B. False
13. Natural antimicrobial peptides have selective immune activation and regulation functions. (A)
    A. True   B. False
14. Antibacterial peptides have broad-spectrum antibacterial activity and have a strong killing effect on bacteria. (A)
    A. True   B. False
15. Some antimicrobial peptides can kill some viruses, fungi, protozoa and cancer cells. (A)
    A. True   B. False
16. The wide range of biological activities of antimicrobial peptides shows their less friendly application prospects in medicine. (B)
    A. True   B. False
17. Xiao Ming discovered that antimicrobial peptides can kill viruses. (A)
    A. True   B. False
18. Xiaohong discovered that antimicrobial peptides can kill bacteria and fungi. (A)
    A. True   B. False
19. Xiaojun checked the information and found that antimicrobial peptides can lead to drug resistance in bacteria. (B)
    A. True   B. False
20. It is meaningless to invest in research into antimicrobial peptides. (B)
    A. True   B. False
21. Antibacterial peptides have not been found to have drug resistance or super bacteria. (A)
    A. True   B. False
22. The current domestic research on antimicrobial peptides is far behind the global average. (B)
    A. True   B. False
23. Antimicrobial peptides can be used in feed. (A)
    A. True   B. False
24. Antimicrobial peptides can be used in animal husbandry. (A)
    A. True   B. False
25. Antimicrobial peptides cannot be used clinically. (B)
    A. True   B. False
26. At present, antimicrobial peptides can replace antibiotics. (B)
    A. True   B. False
27. The content of antimicrobial peptides in animals is very small. (A)
    A. True   B. False
28. The extraction of antimicrobial peptides from animals has a low yield, a long time, a complicated process, and a high cost. (A)
    A. True   B. False
29. It is of great significance to carry out genetic engineering research on antimicrobial peptides. (A)
    A. True   B. False
30. Our team name is Peptide. (B)
    A. True   B. False
2. Multiple-choice questions (3 attacks per question)
31. When did synthetic biology appear? (B)
    A. twentieth century   B. twenty-first century
32. Synthetic biology representation (A)
    A. Genetic recombination technology   B. Medical surgery technology
33. Which of the following is the English word for antibiotics? (B)
    A. peptide   B. antibiotic
34. Which organisms are mainly eliminated by antibiotics? (B)
    A, bacteria, viruses   B, bacteria, fungi
35. How about the use of antibiotics? (C)
    A. Very good   B. Very bad   C. orderly, sometimes there are allergies, drug resistance, etc.
36. What should we do if we have a severe cold? (A)
    A. Seek medical attention in time.   B. Take antibiotics by yourself.
37. Which antibiotic does amoxicillin belong to? (A)
    A, penicillin   B, cephalosporin
38. What diseases can antibiotics treat? (B)
    A. New coronary pneumonia   B. Bacterial pneumonia
39. Which of the following can antibiotics kill? (B)
    A. Cancer cells   B. Fungus
40. Approximately how many deaths are directly related to antibiotic resistance globally in a year? (A)
    A, 1 million   B, 500,000   C, 100,000
41. How many people die from drug-resistant infections in the world in one year? (A)
    A, 5 million   B, 3 million   C, 1 million
42. The abuse of antibiotics to us (A)
    A. It's dangerous behavior.   B. It's okay
43. Which of the following is the English word for antimicrobial peptides? (A)
    A. peptide   B. antibiotic
44. Which organisms are mainly eliminated by antimicrobial peptides? (F)
    A, bacteria   B, fungi   C, viruses   D, cancer cells   E, protozoa   F, all of the above.
45. What is the current research status of antimicrobial peptides? (B)
    A. Both research and application have made in-depth progress.   B. There is a lot of research, but not much operation.   C. There is no research and application.
46. Antimicrobial peptides face the problem of "difficulty in extraction," so what method should we adopt? (A)
    A. Genetic engineering research   B. Drug research
47. What are the future application scenarios of antimicrobial peptides? (C)
    A, animal husbandry,   B, medical clinic   C, both A, and B are correct
48. What does our team mainly study? (B)
    A, antibiotics   B, antimicrobial peptides
49. What is the main application of antimicrobial peptides by our team? (A)
    A. Fish feed   B. Cleaning of fish tank water quality
50. What is our attitude towards the innovative product and concept outputs? (B)
    A. Respond positively and encourage innovation.   B. It has nothing to do with me.
4. Team Song
We want to express from this song that despite the numerous difficulties during the competition, such as the failure of experiments, the many documents to be changed, and the problems with the logic found after writing the business plan, we did not get discouraged, but faced these problems bravely and cooperated. We firmly believe that as long as we don't give up, we will always solve the problem together and win the final victory together.
Below are the lyrics of the Pepsick Song
The Song of Pepsick [English/ Chinese]
a paper each day/ 每天一篇论文
revise revise revise / 又改了几轮
what a daunting task / 任务很疯狂
we mustn’t wander off / 来不及走神
countless scrolls / 无数的卷轴
we see no light in the tunnel / 看不到尽头
but the victory is ours / 胜利的勇气
we make it together / 是我在拼凑
painstaking yet fruitful every day / 辛苦但 每一天 都有收获
yeah we make it together / ye 感谢大家一起走过
first time stay up till three o’clock am / 第一次 加班到 凌晨三点
yeah our fingers dancing on the keyboard / ye 键盘和鼠标的探险
I don’t wanna miss a thing / 我不想错过每一次考验
unskilled?! put on a smile face/ 生疏但依然绽放着笑脸
street interview, put on a bold face/ 街头采访不怕被讨厌
freeze! how marvelous photos/ 定格后都是精彩的照片
We have no fear / 我要不畏惧
Failure may bring frustration / 失败后有多少挫折感
but we never stop trying / 从来不放弃
exploring the science/ 探索科学中的未知感
exploring the unknown/ 去探寻世界
We carry the hope, we carry the dream / 怀揣着对梦想的期待
We will win over difficulties/ 就算困难也不会打到
we may get lost / 也许会迷茫
but we have each other / 那就依靠彼此的陪伴
ups and downs of this adventure / 跌宕的轨迹
solutions are to be found/ 问题总会被找到答案
iGEM's beauty
Not only tired but gonna happy
together win the game
Fig 9. The process we were making audio and post-editing
5. Educational Lecture
Fig 10. Poster for Family Lecture:“Sick? Pepsick Will Deal With It !”
We decided to conduct a mini-lecture for those younger kids to teach them about antibiotics and antimicrobial peptides. In order to invite more kids with their parents surely to attend our lecture, we posted a poster online and finally we had
Fig 11. We were giving an educational Lecture to the younger kids about antibiotics through Tencent meeting app
As the target audience is young kids, we used a very cute PPT template and added a lot of animated characters to make the lecture more interesting. In order to win their favor and make the whole process more engaging, we added a Quiz With Award session at the end of the lecture, and this did work in that kids were active participants in answering questions. We were very happy about that and our lecture was very successful. This was also a rare experience for us as little teachers.
6. Educational Videos
① Mini Lecture Recording
Fig 12. We posted the recording of the lecture on Little Red Book
We edited a video about our mini-lecture recording and posted it on Little Red Book in order to ppread the impact that we hope more people can gain these knowledge through our video.
② Animation Video
Fig 13. We posted an animation video on Little Red Book’
We also edited another video by taking Peppa Pig as the main animation charactor to further introduce our project and our goal. It could attract more people to follow us and pay attention to our project.
7. Communication & Fundraising
Fig 14. Merchandise Posters
Fig 15.Promoting our project and merchandise in the shopping square
In order to communicate with the public, our dry lab designed some merchandise with our logo and started a fundraising activity at MTOWN shopping square, in the meantime, we could talk to the public directly for promoting our topic and our project.