The SpringBuds Project is a public welfare science popularization project. We have adopted the method of teaching volunteers, and volunteers go to the public together with our team members for teaching, to carry out rapid expansion and transfer of knowledge. In various places, including primary schools, secondary schools, universities, and hospitals, in the form of online or offline lectures and workshops, we introduced people to the rudimentary knowledge of synthetic biology and plant dyes, and by constantly collecting feedback, we improve our teaching methods and feedback to the project.

Ispiration

SpringBuds means a beautiful metaphor, sowing seeds and germinating in spring. In our previous research, we found that the public knows very little about synthetic biology and plant dyes. Therefore, targeting different audiences, we hope that through our interesting and academic explanations, we can not only introduce the relevant knowledge and process of traditional Chinese culture-plant dyeing to children, while bring them to experience the process of operating plant dyeing at the same time, but also introduce some of the research frontiers of synthetic biology to the students of different majors, and plant the wonders of synthetic biology in the minds of the children.

The idea of soliciting volunteers is influenced by the volunteer culture of our city Shenzhen and the famous saying " When we come to Shenzhen, we will be volunteers". Shenzhen is one of the birthplaces of volunteers in China. To date, there have been more than 2 million volunteers, totaling nearly 9 million hours of service. SpringBuds target a wide audience, including listeners and our trained volunteers. SpringBuds means not only to enlighten children, but also to bring synthetic biology concepts to the public through volunteers, a process that is like a cascade in biology, magnified step by step.

After we released the call for SpringBuds through the Volunteer Association of Southern University of Science and Technology (SUVA), we received responses from dozens of university students, all of whom came from different majors and had different educational backgrounds. However, they all aspired to synthetic biology but were never able to learn further. This event helped them take a key step forward in their synthetic biology exploration.

We use the name "SpringBuds", and further expand its original meaning in the form of activities, the number of participants, the number of times to carry out and other dimensions. Due to the COVID-19 and time and space constraints, some of our activities are online and others are offline. In the form of offline workshops, children in the hospital experienced the whole process of plant dyeing. Likewise, we introduced the colorful and beautiful world of synthetic biology to children thousands of miles away in mountains and villages who had never seen a city. Also, through the classroom offline, in SUSTech No.2 Experimental school, volunteers introduced students there the advanced synthetic biology research, which is closely linked with their classroom, in the classroom on the basis of foreign expansion. We let more children has a new understanding in biology, synthetic biology. Finally, through online propaganda, we introduced some excellent projects of iGEM and iDEC competition in previous years to freshmen from different majors in the college education class of Zhicheng College in SUSTech.

Spring Buds 1: Tanshan Primary School

Background:

Tanshan Primary School was founded in 1962, located in the mountainous countryside, which is very remote. The towns in which they are located are mainly inhabited by some Chinese minority residents, mainly Miao and Zhuang. In 1996, the school was contacted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and received 54,000 RMB from the United Association of British Chinese Associations.

The "Cloud West online Volunteering Teaching Project" is an online auxiliary public welfare project carried out by Shuren college in SUSTech for left-behind children in southwest China. It aims to accompany the growth of those left-behind children and promote social attention to the growth of them with the help of the Internet technology platform. At the same time, it reduces the process cost and leads the public welfare boom of college students. The project is mainly led by Shuren college in SUSTech. Through the online teaching platform, school-run lectures + online pairing + online course platform, the left-behind children are given different aspects of knowledge in study and life.

Process:

Since May 2022, our team, SUSTech_Shenzhen 2022, has experienced online questionnaire registration and offline interview assessment, and finally successfully obtained the qualification to participate in this project. Then, in June and July, we designed a unique curriculum for the Grade 4 and Grade 6 children, showing them the wonderful world and providing them with a wealth of knowledge. Each class only has half an hour. So, how to fully mobilize children's interest and provide appropriate knowledge density in the limited time has become the first problem in our curriculum design process.

For the Grade 4 children, our class mainly adopted the design from the interesting knowledge of color, clothing manufacturing process and so on. On the basis of fully arousing students' interest, we added a lot of short stories about color. For example, why purple was particularly expensive in the ancient East and West, and what happened to its price before it dropped between them. Then, through some interesting video uploaded to Bilibili (Chinese YouTube), we played some color discrimination games. From a row of similar colors, you need to choose the most different color.

For the Grade 6 children, we focused more on the expansion of vision and the introduction of knowledge. We contacted traditional Chinese culture, especially the Book of Songs (the first anthology of verse in China, collecting poems from the 11th century BC to the 6th century BC), to introduce how clothes were dyed in ancient China. Then, based on the comparison of modern industrial dyeing methods, we proposed a synthetic biology method to synthesize dyes. Through the discussion with students, we have reached an agreement that the production of dyes by synthetic biology and the natural extraction of dyes from living organisms such as plants in nature are more environmentally friendly than chemical synthetic dyes. Finally, we return to other applications of synthetic biology in life, such as space, food, fuel, and so on, while stimulating children's interest in biology.

Feedback:

Through the organizer, our team collected the feedback of the children who attended the class and the management teachers who together attended the class with them, and received unanimous praise.

The organizer of this activity thought that we can fully consider children's acceptance ability in addition to professional knowledge, and adjust our teaching plan appropriately, so that children can not only understand the colorful world outside the mountain they live, but also learn more knowledge in the fun.

The students who played the teacher roles believed that they not only learned clothes making, dyeing and other techniques that they had never been exposed to before, but also further understood some traditional Chinese culture and became more interested in history. At the same time, different classroom procedures and teaching techniques are designed for children of different grades, so they can learn more about synthetic biology and plant dyeing.

Spring Buds 2: Spring Sprout Offline volunteer dyeing activity

After we successfully held the Dye From Nature exihibition, we got in touch with SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY HOSPITAL, hoping to organise an activity for some primary and secondery school students to popularize some traditional and interesting dyeing techniques. As a matter of fact, we’ve been arranged similar activities for several years in the name of Spring Sprout, a team of volunteers. Spring Sprout in Chinese is called 春芽，which means planting seeds of konwledge in children’s minds through popularization activities and harvesting hope in the future.

Before the day of the event, we purchased all the materials needed for the activity online with the help of Ms.Dong from the hospital and put together nine volunteers. On August 17th, just the day before the event, the leader and one of the volunteers went to the site to check up the supplies. The next day, all our volunteers gathered at the school at 7:40 in the morning and set off for the hospital. After everyone arrived, we started to arrange the seats and hand out materials to the children.

Our volunteers taught the children some knowledge about Chinese traditional dyeing methods, including tie-dye and plant rubbing dye. Tie dye, kunown as strand dye and clip dye, is a traditional and unique Chinese folk dyeing process, in which the fabric is partically tiied so that it can be colored in an uncertain and beautiful pattern. Plant rubbing dye, which refers to picking fresh leaves and flowers, soaking in alum water and then excessing water with paper towl, harmmering with a small hammer or round pebble until the veins of the plants could be seen.

After our volunteer gave the children a demonstration, they were all very long for trying by theirselves. With our help, every child had fun trying tie dye and plant rubbing dye and everyone got his first work. All of us had a wonderful time, which was full of laughter and joy. After finishing, we cleaned up the field, thew the garbage and had lunch with the children. The teacher in charge thanked us very much and sent us a thank-you note.

Spring Buds 3: SUSTech No.2 Experimental school

Background:

The SpringBuds activity in SUSTech No.2 Experimental school is actually our first offline teaching activity in practical sense. According to different age groups, we have made double versions of science popularization content for primary school and junior high school respectively, so that students can receive and absorb new knowledge which match their grades and what they have learnt. This year, we went to the class of the fifth grade of primary school and the second grade of junior high school to communicate with students.

"Have you ever heard of DNA?" Before the question was over, quite a few students raised their hands. "DNA is genetic material. It has a double helix structure," said one student. This is completely beyond our understanding of elementary school students. After lamenting the progress of The Times, we are more eager to teach them the concept of synthetic biology.

In the class, we let the students have a preliminary understanding of synthetic biology through the image analogy. To impress them, we designed two rounds of interactive sessions to encourage them to use synthetic biology to solve problems in their lives.

Some students wanted elephants to grow wings for public fire fighting, while some students wanted to use bacteria to purify water. Also, there are some students involved in the anti-epidemic methods...... In this lesson, we talked about everything from nuclear fission and fusion to global warming. We did not expect that a simple introduction to science could set off such a magnificent wave of thinking.

After class, we randomly interviewed several students, all of whom were enthusiastic about this popular science model.

Compared with primary school, middle school classes are more active. Amid loud cries, the keynote speaker stepped up to the podium. At the beginning, the students were still immersed in the joy of "getting a not hard lesson", but with the gradual spread of science, all the attention gradually shifted to the classroom.

"As junior high school students already have a certain knowledge base, we pass over some of the basics and encourage students to share what they have gained in and out of the class: what is genetically modified? What is hybrid rice? The response from the students to these questions was overwhelming and very positive." Sharing from the lecture volunteers

We have also meticulously prepared a TED talk by a professor from the Shenzhen Synthesis Institute as an entry point for an in-depth introduction to synthetic biology. To ensure that everyone can understand and accept it, we have used the construction of a factory as an example and described the basic principles, connotations and methods of synthetic biology in a vivid way through various analogies.

During the free discussion session, students actively asked the volunteers about synthetic biology, and we patiently answered them all. Many enthusiastic students also exchanged questions about bioethics with us privately after the class. Afterwards, the students drew on their knowledge and wondered whether synthetic biology could be used to store and transduce human memories. Could a new life form be created? And so on.

Spring Buds 4: Zhicheng College in SUSTech

On Thursday, 21 April 2022 at 16:20 BST, our team brought a sharing of synthetic biology knowledge to the students in the college education class of Zhicheng College in SUSTech via an online conference.

The target audience of our sharing is mainly the freshman of SUSTech. Due to the special system of our university, freshmen students do not have their own majors, but spend a year studying and living in the university, increasing their initial understanding of various majors through various ways such as lectures and laboratory visits, and then choosing their preferred majors according to their level of understanding of each major. Therefore, it is essential for our first-year students to attend lectures on various majors and to understand what the frontiers and directions of research in each major are.

Our sharing focuses on three aspects of biology, and in particular synthetic biology, in an introduction.

First we introduced the origins of synthetic biology. It started with people experimenting with organics, then the discovery of the structure of the DNA double helix, and then in 1980 Hobom B. formally introduced the concept of synthetic biology. With subsequent modifications, the definition of synthetic biology has become internationally recognised. 2010 to date, synthetic biology has formed a closed feedback loop of learn-design-build-test. With hundreds of synthetic biology companies, a multi-billion dollar industry is standing before us.

And then we highlighted the iGEM and iDEC that came into being and detailed the synthetic biology projects from previous years at the University of New South Wales, Vilnius University in Lithuania, the University of Rochester and the University of Toulouse. Through many vivid cases, we showed the freshman students how to draw the distance between research and industry, and the ways to accelerate the cutting-edge technology into production use.

Finally, as a discussion and extension, we discussed in more detail with the students some of the issues that synthetic biology may face in the future, particularly with regard to the ethical issues that may be involved.

We believe that such sharing will lead to more students becoming interested in synthetic biology, and by the end of their freshman year (June 2022), more students indeed chose to major in life sciences. Some of these students then chose a mentor in synthetic biology to start their subsequent studies and research.

Through questionnaire survey and offline interview, we know that as a new discipline, synthetic biology has a low popularity among the public. See details in Survey. In order to popularize the knowledge of synthetic biology to the public, and promote our team. In mid April, we cooperated with a 2022 iGEM team SZU_China from Shenzhen University to design and produce the brochure "The Way To synbio". We held an online meeting with SZU_China 2022, the iGEM team of Shenzhen University, to determine the content and form of the brochure. The editors of the two teams agreed that the content of the brochure would be written along a core line: First, a few stories about the definition and development of synthetic biology; Second, the great potential of synthetic biology in application is described through concrete examples; Finally, the ethical problems of synthetic biology are discussed. The art students of the two teams agreed on the size, illustration, layout and other details of the brochure.

And the brochure was used as a publicity material for many subsequent activities, such as the offline exhibition of "Nature and Color", which was provided for the public to read and understand. All three hundred brochures were distributed and received a positive response. On April 14, in the Biotechnology theme poster competition of Shenzhen University, we made two posters on bioweapons and human gene editing, explaining their controversies and dangers, and won the first prize and the second prize respectively.

It is said that the 21st century is the century of biology. Indeed, since the end of the 20th century, under the joint efforts of the majority of scholars, life science ushered in a stage of rapid development. At the same time, the birth and development of various new cross-disciplines and sub-disciplines represented by synthetic biology have injected new vitality into the progress of life science.

However, there are also many hidden problems behind the prosperity. A classic condition is that some customers are not willing to buy genetically modified (GM) rice in supermarkets. This is a public food safety problem based on doubts of biotechnology. This is also a biosafety problem. The birth of cloning, artificial insemination and other technologies has caused a global uproar. Countries around the world gradually pay attention to the control and regulation of high-risk biological laboratories, especially the legal usage of the gene editing technology.

What will the new generation of life science researchers and students of biology have to say about these questions? With this in mind, we organized an interesting, valuable and meaningful debate competition from July 15 to 17, 2022. Due to the policy against COVID-19 in campus, this competition was held online.

We named this debate the ‘Synthetic Biology Invitational Debate Series’, and all the debates are designed around ‘safety, legal, moral and ethical aspects related to (synthetic) biology’. Compared with the normal debate competition, this focuses more on the exchange of relevant knowledge, views and experiences on a certain issue, and shows good debate ideas and logic. We hope that by building such a platform, the contestants, spectators and judges can deepen their understanding of relevant issues, gain something and inspire something.

We have invited three debate teams. They are the debate team of Medical School of SUSTech, the debate team of SUSTech and the debate team of Xinglin of Medical School of Suzhou University.

We also invited Associate Professor Yi Deng (School of Life Sciences, SUSTech), Associate Professor Ancheng Huang (School of Life Sciences, SUSTech), Lecturer Shaoman Yang and Professor Yali Cong to be the guests and judges of this competition.

Through discussions with Ronghua Huang who is the representative inheritor of the provincial intangible cultural heritage "Traditional Plant Dye Dyeing" project, we were inspired to apply the methods of synthetic biology to traditional plant printing and dyeing. On the one hand, this can advocate people to use natural dyes instead of chemical dyes, thereby reducing environmental pollution. On the other hand, it is also to promote the inheritance of China's provincial intangible cultural heritage "traditional plant dye dyeing", which is a traditional dyeing technique. We held an on-campus theme exhibition "Dyeing by Nature", which introduced students to traditional plant printing and dyeing, and showed the dye-dyed fabrics produced using synthetic biology methods. We also collect relevant photography and painting works from students and interact with them. In order to let more people pay attention to the dyeing of traditional plant dyes, we also launched the online theme exhibition of "Natural Dyeing".

Popular science is the process of popularizing scientific and cultural knowledge among the public. We believe that popular science can be divided into two types: intellectual science and skill science. The former takes the form of transmitting abstract and relatively advanced natural and social science knowledge; The latter takes the form of popularizing relevant legal provisions and imparting common sense of life and specific practical skills.

Therefore, we have designed a series of pushes in accordance with the three aspects of science popularization synthetic biology knowledge, science popularization biosecurity law, science popularization textile dyeing and finishing industry process flow and anti-fouling guidelines. We designed the "Saturday SynBio" section, and for two consecutive months, every Saturday released a popular science push of synthetic biology, so that more people pay attention to the emerging discipline of synthetic biology. On April 15, 2022, China's seventh National Security Education Day, we released the law popularization push of the Biosecurity Law of the People's Republic of China for four consecutive days, advocating that people attach importance to biosecurity. We also designed the "Dyeing Weekend" section, and published the science popularization push of the textile dyeing and finishing industry process flow and anti-fouling guide every weekend for a month, introducing the basic situation of the textile dyeing and finishing industry to the public, understanding their work processes, and calling on more people to pay attention to environmental issues in this field.

Before the online teaching event, the FAFU team produced and distributed questionnaires. We look at things like location and age. The statistical results are shown in the figure. At the same time, we collected the content that students want to know, and made us more clear through word cloud. Find out what their interests are.

(2)Directed evolution teaching

After the survey of biological interests, we and other teams discussed the teaching tasks. Ten teams took part in the online teaching event: FAFU; BNU-China; Tongji_China; CPU_CHINA; JLU_China; Tsinghua; SUSTech_Shenzhen; ShanghaiTech_China; Peking; BIT.

We decided to teach directed evolution due to the similar topic with our Tyrian Purple Evolution (TPE) project. We gave the definition of Directed Evolution and made a compare with natural evolution. Also, a Historical View on Directed Evolution is showed. Then, we summarized five steps of directed evolution in slides: Selection of gene of interest; Generation of mutant gene library; Expression of mutant genes; Screening & selecting of beneficial gene; Further rounds of mutagenesis to achieve phenotypic goal. Applications, advantages and limitations of directed evolution are discussed. Besides, we taught other protein engineering strategies and made a compare with directed evolution. We want our audience to know how to choose the correct protein engineering strategies in different conditions.

(3)After classes

In addition to the staff who organized the activities, 225 students participated in our course, and even attracted students from Singapore and Australia. Three students from Australia. We recorded each lecture on video and uploaded it to Bilibili after the lecture. At the end of the course, we collected the contact information of the students participating in the course, and we randomly selected several students to give gifts. For all the students, we made electronic postcards to keep as a souvenir.