Communication and Education
Introduction
For educating and communicating the health dangers of incomplete digestion of fat in food, we prepared many materials and carried out a series of activities for raising public awareness. Moreover, we also included information about synthetic biology and the topic that we were specifically working on in those educational and communication activities for educating the community about our topic.
In order to maximize the publicity without causing any inconvenience to our audiences, we mainly conducted educational and communication activities online and spread the information through social media.
Educational Articles
WeChat is the most popular social media platform in China thus we created our own WeChat Official Account where we could publish educational articles and team updates for the general public.
Our first post
So far our first post has received 284 reads and 157 likes where we made our team introduction to the public in the first time, including our team name and team logo. No doubt that most people have interests in our topic.
● Synthetic Biology Series I & II
Synthetic biology is a major focus of our educational articles and a necessary prerequisite for our introduction to other specific knowledge. Therefore, we use two articles to introduce the development status of synthetic biology and its bright development prospects.
Synthetic Biology Series I post: Synthetic Biology
In the first article (Synthetic Biology Series I: Synthetic Biology), we first introduced the connection of synthetic biology to our project goal, which is why we introduced synthetic biology. After that, we introduced the development of synthetic biology from the aspects of definition, application and relationship with human life.
Synthetic Biology Series II post: Why synthetic biology has a "money way"
Subsequently, in the second article (Synthetic Biology Series II: Why synthetic biology has a "money way"), we continue to discuss some future development issues of synthetic biology in depth. It is worth mentioning that we got 113 likes for this article, which is a great encouragement to us.
In this article, we contrast synthetic biology with biology in the traditional sense, thus breaking everyone's stereotypes about synthetic biology. Following that, we echoed our team goal with synthetic biology. We also selected the examples of medicines and hair dyes to illustrate that synthetic biology can drive technological innovation, while also being highly efficient and economical. All in all, it deserves our long-term tracking and attention.
● Introduction to Lipase
Lipase is our main research object. In animals, various lipase control processes such as digestion, absorption, fat reconstruction, and lipoprotein metabolism. Therefore, we posted an article that specifically introduced the function and mechanism of lipase.
The post : Function and Mechanism of Lipase
In this article, we first describe the link between lipase and digestive tract health and indigestion, thus indicating the purpose of our experiments. In fact, lipase has been widely used in the development of food, medicine, and washing products, and will have a broader application prospect in the future.
Educational Video
In addition, we also produced our promotional video and published it on Bili Bili, which is currently the most popular video platform for young Chinese.
Promotional video launched on Bili Bili
We have introduced the dangers of indigestion to everyone, hoping to draw public attention to physical health and eating habits. Especially now that most young people have irregular diets and unhealthy exercise habits, which makes indigestion a common problem that plagues young people.
We hope to pay attention to this problem with everyone and hope to contribute to solving this problem.
Online Educational Session
In order to raise the awareness of unhealthy effects that are caused by indigestion, we delivered an online session for educating our community. Thus firstly we prepared a simple poster for spreading online to invite our friends, classmates and other people around us to attend this session.
Poster for the online session (left) and snapshot as group photo for all participants (right)
In this online educational session, we first introduced our team and team mission to our audience. Then, we explained the concept of synthetic biology and briefly summarized our experiment procedures. Next, for the most important part of this session, we introduced what indigestion is and its hazards to human health.We hope to use this method to draw attention to health issues, which is in line with the current social development trend.
Slides of our presentation in the online session
In this online educational session, we first introduced our team and team mission to our audience. Then, we explained the concept of synthetic biology and briefly summarized our experiment procedures. Next, for the most important part of this session, we introduced what indigestion is and its hazards to human health. We hope to use this method to draw attention to health issues, which is in line with the current social development trend.
Educational Application
Throughout researching our project topic, we found out that many people are lacking the basic knowledge of synthetic biology, indigestion, and the usages and functions of the lipase and E. coli. Moreover, many existing websites do not contain all information on those concepts. As a result, it is hard for people to really study those topics online by themselves. Furthermore, by just reading the articles online, people always forget what they have learned from the articles after days. Therefore, we want to establish a software that allows people to find as much information about synthetic biology, indigestion, lipase, and E. coli as possible while testing their understanding conveniently and efficiently. In addition, because we want people can study and test anywhere, a mobile application can meet all expectations.
Thus we developed a mobile phone application for informing our community about the concepts such as synthetic biology, fats and lipase, and indigestion. In this application, users not only can gain more knowledge about our topic but also can take a small quiz for testing their learning outcomes. As a result, our application can achieve the goal of really educating the users so that they can have more understanding of the unhealthy effects of incomplete digestion.
The design page of our educational app is relatively simple, the content is clear, and it is easy for everyone to understand and use. We look forward to rolling out the app's multilingual capabilities in the future. In this way, people from different languages and cultural backgrounds can use it and gain some knowledge from it.
*We also have more detailed information about our educational app on the wiki page Software.
Various pages in our educational app “Lip-oceil”
Offline Communication With Public
In addition, we also try to communicate our topics with the public. During our street survey, we found that the public attaches great importance to the concept of health. After our further communication, we also noticed that this does not mean that everyone shares the same ideal healthy lifestyle. There is a popular word in Chinese society called "Yang Sheng" meaning health care, which means nourishing life in Chinese. We found that Chinese people's concept of health is greatly influenced by traditional Chinese medicine. For example, "Qi" is a very special existence in the Chinese concept of health, and it is necessary to achieve a balance of yin and yang in order to maintain health. Of course, we also shared them with the project we are woking on and deliver the message that synthetic biology could contribute to human health.
These exchanges have helped us to better connect with the public, and also provided the necessary information for the promotion of our subsequent projects.
We were communicating with the public during offline survey