Education

Our teacher Mr Mackay has a young son called Torin and he just started kindergarten. As there are not many popular science picture books for young people on the market, we collaborated with worldshaper-HZBIOX and LZU-CHINA to draw children's picture books about synthetic biology based on the contents of the three teams' projects to expand people's knowledge. We hope that this will inspire Torin to get into synthetic biology in the future. Students from SZ-SHD and worldshaper-HZBIOX provided artists, and LZU-CHINA invited Professor Lifang Li to provide guidance and help as a style guide. Lifang Li is a Professor of literature and Dean of the School of Arts of Lanzhou University and, a member of the International Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL). She has been engaged in the study of children's literature theory and criticism for more than ten years. She suggested that we must confirm the audience first. Our target audience was primary and middle school students, thus the language needed to be easy to understand. Simplifying professional vocabulary is extremely challenging but a lot of fun. After finishing, in order to ensure that the audience can understand the content, we set up a questionnaire in the following offline education activities. We found that most people could understand picture books and found them interesting and gained a lot of new knowledge. Only a few people reported they were not fully engaged or that they do not understand. We found the main reason for this was because they did not understand the professional terms. We continue to improve the picture book and hope that it can be published in the future.

We collaborated with RS_United_China to write a textbook on the topic of how to design a SynBio experiment step by step. It explains many important procedures such as; plasmid construction, wester blotting and using an electron microscope to observe expression of products. Our sincere hope is that after reading this book, students can briefly learn how to do it on their own.

On August 7, 2022, the Science and Technology Museum in Hangzhou held a synthetic biology education event with three IGEM teams: LZU-CHINA, SZ-SHD, and worldshaper-HZBIOX. Our three teams engaged and led young children in creative activities such as; making DNA models, pipette gun head collages, and making plasmid balloons. We hope that this will engage future generations to be interested in and understand the basic knowledge about synthetic biology. The main task of the SZ-SHD team in this event is to make posters and promote the event. Our teams collaborated to produce a brief introduction to synthetic biology through animations which can help children who are without a basic understanding of what synthetic biology is. The event was a huge success with hundreds of children and adults attending. At the end of the event, each child who completes all three tasks received a small gift, for example, a key chain. We also provided them with the children’s picture book and questionnaire to feedback on. From the feedback, we determined to improve the picture book and produce something that can used in education.

We used our advantages as a school team to publicize and give public lessons at Dulwich High School for year 10 and 11 students. We conducted propaganda in the school bulletin and gave presentations about the introduction and basics of synthetic biology such as what synthetic biology is, protein synthesis, plasmid, the use of synthetic biology, and so on. In the first session, we taught them how to use a pipette and played the game 'who uses the pipette most accurately'. In the second session, we held an experimental class with the theme of detecting 'Who Killed Mr Dalling' by using the fingerprinting technique and taught them the use of gel electrophoresis. All the students had a great experience and learned a lot.

Covid has taught us a lot about online learning! Instead allowing the rolling lockdowns and online learning brought on by the cirus we realised that the internet is a good source of education and promotion. It's a good place for us to reach a wide audience, not only limited to our small region. We held a meetings on Microsoft Teams and Tencent meeting where we talked about the introduction and basics of synthetic biology such as plasmid, DNA and the potential use of synthetic biology.

We often post popular science articles and videos on social media. We mainly post on the official account on WeChat which has many followers, but we also post on others such as Bilibili and Twitter.

In order to promote igem and make others be interested and involved in synthetic biology, we designed many outreach products and contacted manufacturers to produce them

We held a workshop at school to share our outreach products with students. If they subscribe to our WeChat official account, they can choose a mask for free. We promoted our project at school assembly, and gave the mask to everyone.

Children Picture Book

One-hour Crash Course in Synthetic Biology