iGEM provides us with a good opportunity to study the new concept of biology synthetic biology. As high school students, we have experienced a lot of hard to obtain knowledge inside and outside the laboratory. Not everyone has such a good chance to gain such experience, or to have any understanding of what synthetic biology is. Through our investigation, there are still many people who know little about synthetic biology. In order to get more people involved in our project, we decided to focus on public participation and education. We have designed different contents of public lectures for high school students and the public, and we also use micro signals to carry out the related knowledge of synthetic biology on the Internet.

  We have written 12 passages couting over 20,000 words in total on our WeChat public account. These passages include an introduction of our team, more detailed explanations of our objectives, and introduction to synthetic biology and microbiology. We got thousands of reads and likes.

  To further promote our project and popularize synthetic biology, we created a bilibili account.

  We made one video about our chassis organism - E. coli. We plan to make another video about our experience in the lab, which will be released soon. We believe that videos can better convey the messages than words and images only.

  In addition, Xinrong li of our team carried out a science popularization education of synthetic biology for the students in the biological laboratory of his school. First of all, the basic concepts and experiments of synthetic biology and the contents of iGEM competition were introduced. Then we introduce the content of our project.

  Students are very interested in our iGEM project and have a lot of interaction with us. Through our lectures, they realized that synthetic biology is not a distant subject limited to laboratories, but a new discipline closely related to our life, which can be used to solve many problems in real life. As our team has done, even high school students can understand, learn and apply the knowledge of synthetic biology, and society provides us with such a platform, such as the iGEM competition.

  Primary school students are always full of curiosity, so we used creative ways to show the wonder of the biological world to them.

  We cooperated with community welfare organizations and popularized science to students there. To attract students, clay and other hand-made materials were used to make models of gene-editing. Besides, we organized interesting games to let them know the importance of bio-safety. This popular science class attracted them very much. We also established long-term cooperation with relevant public welfare organizations.

  Most members of society tend to think over when facing synthetic biology products because the unknown triggered their fear and rejection. So it’s necessary to conduct popular science for the general public. We first collected basic data from them. The content involved their basic understanding and attitude bias towards gene-editing technologies, the tendency to choose science popularization methods and their recognition of our gene-editing research in the laboratory.

  Based on the questionnaire result, we found that the popular science handbook was the most welcoming way to spread knowledge. The main reason was that it is readable, interesting and easy to understand, so we carefully designed our handbook and greatly stimulated the interest of the public.

  Our science manual was divided into two parts. The first part mainly included the introduction of synthetic biology and iGEM. We showed the concepts, methods and goals of synthetic biology in vivid language. The second part was used to introduce the popular topics——gene-editing and CRISPR/Cas9 technology. We explained the mechanism of CRISPR/Cas9 through cartoons and introduced the wide application of it.

  We spread it both in printed and electronic forms，and set up delivery points in some related organizations to distribute them to the public. (Figure 8) Through the popular science manual, we helped more people understand biology knowledge better. We put the electronic manual on the WeChat Public Platform and other platforms so that the public can browse it online.