Overview

From the perspective of the history of science, the philosophy of science, the process of development of science and its nature, it is clear that scientific knowledge is not truth, but is falsifiable, and this nature determines that expression and communication are essential in the field of science.

Therefore, during the process of our iGEM project, we have a strong science-based approach to communication and education.

Main Target

After talking with relevant professors and reading previous excellent websites, our education will be structured around such four objectives.

We then explored the educational approach and felt that the format should be based on the interest of the audience to be educated in order to improve the educational impact. We distributed questionnaires for this purpose.

Based on the results of the research, we decided to use a variety of methods of education that would be of interest to the general public, including: the development of paper materials, the production of online promotional videos, public tweets, offline presentations and interactive events.

Identify the target audience

In order to make our education broader and more diverse, we have selected audiences with different levels of knowledge and different educational backgrounds. The results of the previous questionnaires were also used to select content that was appropriate to their age level and that would be of most interest to them as teaching science. Judging from the results of our teaching and the feedback from our audience, we have achieved a certain degree of success in our education.

Primary School Biology Discussion Base

Considering the young age and short attention span of Year 6 students, we created a Primary School Biology Discussion Base through a diverse teaching format in order to make the transfer of knowledge more efficient in a limited time.

High School Synthetic Biology Workshop

Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Affiliated School is an international private school that invites distinguished scientists to give lectures on science every year, aiming to create learning talents with the 4Cs (Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication) who can adapt to the international society. We aim to create learning talents with the 4Cs (Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration and Communication) who are ready for the international community. We were fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in this year's lecture cycle as an iGEMer, presenting a lecture on "What is Synthetic Biology"and "What is our project" to the junior and senior high school students here.

Our lectures include an introduction to popular methods in the field of synthetic biology, examples of synthetic biology projects that make use of these methods and concepts in their design, and finally how to come up with a good idea in this field.

The students who participated in our workshop came from a wide range of ages and disciplines, from humanities and social sciences to life sciences, and they were all very active in the discussions about innovative synthetic biology. This mix of people really cemented the notion that everyone can participate in science and help develop it in a meaningful way. By the end of the workshop, we were very pleased to feel that they could provide input into the generation of ideas, regardless of their previous knowledge of biology.

Presentation at the Faculty of Science

"The 21st century is the age of systems bioscience and engineering - that is, biosystems analytics and artificial biological systems that will bring about the technological and industrial revolution of the future."

Synthetic biology is a highly integrated discipline and we are looking forward to the development of synthetic biology in other directions than the industrial ones we are involved in this year in our school.

To make us better prepared for the presentation, questionnaires were distributed before the presentation.

To our surprise, not many people knew about synthetic biology, and if they were to rate their level of knowledge, most of them were still on a scale of 1 or 2. This also shows the great potential for education and advancement in synthetic biology.

Therefore, we look forward to spreading public awareness and making synthetic biology more widely familiar during the presentation.

During the presentation, in addition to introducing synthetic biology, we also introduced iGEM and synthetic biology as a whole to give students an understanding of how iGEM is used to solve problems using synthetic biology. Apart from the professional knowledge, we think it is more important that the students can feel the humanistic care and social responsibility unique to the competition through the daily routine we share with them, which is what we think is the most attractive point of the competition.

Use appropriate materials to help us augment the impacts

Making records and brochures

In addition to our online and offline presentations, we have been thinking about how we can use appropriate materials to complement our education and improve our science outreach. We have been inspired by the materials we use in the classroom and we are looking forward to producing a brochure that will have a similar effect to the materials. The functions we expect our brochures to have are as follows:

This material has worked surprisingly well in the production and distribution of brochures. The brochures have a strong promotional purpose and through their graphic and stylistic format, they not only present the iGEM image but also promote the products. Many potential customers who are looking for cooperation or purchasing products do not visit the company in person, but when they have a brochure, they can read it and get a systematic understanding of all aspects of the company. This is why brochures can be of great marketing value.

After presenting the brochure to Prof. Raju, the expert with whom we had previously shared our experimental design, he expressed a new understanding of the iterations between our experiments and modelling and was happy to continue to follow the project and see the progress of our team.

In our in-school publicity, we place our brochures in locations where the public can look through them. We found that the concise text and pictures in the brochure were more likely to interest students in iGEM Logic than the verbal description of our project. They were intrigued by the excerpts from our experiments and modelling, but also immersed in the humanistic appeal of hp. The use of materials like the brochure made our outreach more effective.

Make synthetic biology more accessible to wider audience

Using online public platforms

In today's epidemic era, online forms of education can better take advantage of the highly developed modern communication devices. In addition to this, online education can also effectively avoid the disadvantages of geographical limitations, allowing the same amount of time spent preparing and producing instructional videos to be seen by more people, therefore increasing the efficiency of education.

We chose the online communication method that could potentially reach the largest audience - online tweets. We posted our promotional video and some scientific articles about synthetic biology on the XJTLU iGEM social account.

Many people have found us through the contact information we have left by seeing the information advertised online and have exchanged ideas with us.

Conceive innovative ways to educate

Building new community

Water environment and biological solutions have always been a big part of iGEM projects each year. Nanjing_NFLS and XJTLU-CHINA believed that by assembling more teams in this area, we would be able to generate rigorous impact both in public education and in contributing to the iGEM environment community. Therefore, we co-initiated the new community, namely Freshwater Bioremediation Alliance.

Our alliance soon attracted the interest of teams with similar processing directions, and our ranks grew rapidly. By now, our alliance includes an additional five teams in addition to the founding two, which are CHINA-FAFU, UM_Macau, GXU-China, Nanjing-China, NPU-CHINA. After this, we organized a number of online meetings, in which we achieved some progressive consensus.

In the education section, we also had an active exchange of ideas and innovative approaches to education other than the conventional ones. We have also gained fresh ideas for education from the exchange, such as using public online platforms to publish online lessons, or creating program games to increase public interest in learning about us. These ideas have also been applied in the education mentioned above and have led to better educational results.

Eventually, after our discussions, we decided to jointly deliver online lessons to a junior high school in Guangxi. There is no doubt that in the context of multi-university teamwork, online delivery is one of the most advantageous methods. Not only does it break the geographical barrier, it also allows our lessons to be preserved forever.

Online Alliance Group Teaching

The junior school where we teach is located in an economically underdeveloped area of southwest China, where poor infrastructure has led to a serious information barrier. Their exposure to cutting-edge information like synthetic biology is almost nil. The meaning of our education is to bring this information to the widest audience we can. Perhaps a single dissemination of our information may inspire them to explore and become outstanding scientists in the future.

With the theme "For water, for the future", we chose to present some knowledge at the junior high school students' level of understanding, according to the direction of the project each school team was working on. XJTLU introduced some technologies related to our sewage treatment and briefly explained the significance of our project. Everyone expressed great interest and curiosity, and we were impressed by their energy to introduce some additional synthetic biology knowledge beyond the preparation.

At the end of the lecture, the children told us that they thought synthetic biology was when people connected " genes" into networks that allowed cells to perform the various tasks envisaged by the designers. We were delighted that they had such an understanding of such an abstract concept and look forward to their breakthroughs and achievements based on it.