Overview
In the public survey, we found that the public's awareness of the disposal of shrimp and crab shells for recycling, as well as the knowledge and acceptance of using biotechnology to produce biofuels is still insufficient, and there are different opinions on our synthetic biological methods to produce biofuel. Therefore, we publicized scientific knowledge through various ways, promote our projects and collect feedback at the same time. Our team mainly achieve education and communication goals through social media, online streaming publicity, offline public engagement activity, and comic books. We are convinced that people have learned more about iGEM and synthetic biology through communicating with us, they also have saw the potential of synthetic biology.
1. Self-media updating
The domestic accounts of the Worldshaper-NJBIOX team include station bilibili and WeChat official account, and foreign accounts include Instagram and Youtube. We do some popular science education on these self-media platforms, and share our team's daily life and topics.
In the tweets, there are introductions to the team's topics and the daily sharing of the laboratory. With the rise in oil prices, people's attention to fuels has gradually increased, but without the reasons behind the rise in fuel and oil prices, the potential value of biofuels is unclear. The state has promulgated some policies for garbage classification, but people do not know how to deal with and classify garbage. In tweets, the team introduced a variety of biofuel and waste sorting and disposal methods. Our popular science articles have more readings, and more people have learned about fuel and garbage disposal, which has effectively raised people's awareness of these contents.
These self-media help us publicize what we have done in the iGEM competition, help the public understand the discipline of synthetic biology, and make people pay attention and understand some social issues.
2. Online Streaming Publicity
2.1. July 10
Our team co-organized a live promotional event with 6 other iGEM teams. The goal was to inform the public of the application of synthetic biology by introducing each team's project.
The topics of 7 iGEM teams covered a wide range of fields, including energy, environmental protection, medicine, food safety, etc.
Our live broadcast attracted over two hundred audience, achieving the goal of reaching out to a wider audience.
2.2. August 13
At 7:30 pm on August 13th, the two teams, Worldshaper-Nanjing and Worldshaper-NJBIOX, launched a joint online public engagement activity. The main purpose of the session is to promote the knowledge of synthetic biology and its application in the field of environmental protection and food safety. We are honored to have invited Huang Zhijun, the ambassador of iGEM Asia, to inntroduce the history of the iGEM competition and its development in recent years, also explaining their topic selection and experiment techniques last year. In this session, the captains of the two teams introduced their teams’ division of labor, topic selection and experiments.
In addition, Yunzheng Tian, the leader of the wet team of Worldshaper-Nanjing, and Xingkang Chen, the leader of the second biological experiment team, also popularized the two topics of probiotics and prebiotics, and the use of waste to make bio-fuels. Through this joint public announcement, we have promoted everyone's understanding of the iGEM competition, and introduced the concept of synthetic biology to students who want to participate in the competition in the future. In the end, we also popularized the relevant subject knowledge and answered questions to the students and parents, which drew a successful conclusion to this publicity activity.
3. Comic Book
We believed that by using real promotional materials, the effectiveness of our knowledge promotion will be boosted. Also, distributing the booklets to the public will make the promotion more sustainable, as they will be spread among the community. With this in mind, we collaborated with Worldshaper-Nanjing and produced a manual on the use of common biology laboratory equipments, which illustrates the main steps of the experiment procedures and explains purpose of these steps.
30 of the manuals were distributed to the people who participated in the 10.5 event (see in the next section); they were also distributed to local communities and schools. We sent out 40 copies in the grand clubs recruitment event (upper 3 figures) and entrusted the school lab manager to place 12 copies in the 4 labs (down left). Worldshaper-Nanjing helped us give out another 30 copies in the International Baccalaureate of NFLS (down right). We hope that they would help the residents and students acquire a basic understanding of common biology experiment procedures.
4. Offline Public Engagement Activity
We took advantage of China's long National Day holiday and participated in an offline public engagement activity hosted by NFLS_Nanjing and Nanjing_NFLS in the Lanyuan community. Our target community was high school students who have biology backgrounds this time and the topic was the implementation of synthetic biology in environmental protection, medicine, industry, etc. We made the lab operation comic manuals introduced in the previous part for the event with our partner team Worldshaper-Nanjing. They were given out during the activity to introduce to the residents the instruments in the biology lab and to popularize synthetic biology and our topic.
The residents were intrigued by our manual. They also expressed their willingness to support our project.
