Drawing Contest

If I Were the Creator is a drawing contest we held this year. Considering the most unrestricted minds would be children’s, this contest is mainly for the primary school and kindergarten students. For a very long time, the Chinese students are said to be lack of imagination and creation. We attempt to break down this stereotype by giving them the freedom to design creatures that they like and providing them a platform to show their masterpieces.

We contacted primary schools and kindergartens in Shenzhen. The teachers and students showed great enthusiasm for this contest. We received 225 pieces of drawing within one month. Almost every teacher we contacted showed great interest in having this kind of cooperation next time.

See it in action

Survey

We designed an online survey to evaluate stigma and discrimination to HIV/AIDS. We also put questions about gene treatment in it. We collected 2211 answers in about one month. And here are some important conclusions we draw from the statistics collected.

1. We should enhance the education of detailed basic knowledge besides the transmitting pathways for the primary school and middle school;
2. The knowledge about HIV transmitting should be most emphasized among the old
3. Most of the respondents express that they can accept the foreign gene introduced to their body and would like to try the gene therapy.

See the Data

AIDS Ice Bucket Challenge

When we were doing our project in summer vacation, we also noticed viral spreading of Ice Bucket Challenge. This activity intends to promote awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We also want to arose people’s awareness of HIV/AIDS and promote them to learn more about this disease. And we also desired to show the world what our project is in an easy way. So we created Aides Ice Bucket Challenge.

See the video

Consultation

Inner-school iGEM Meetup

We held an inner-school meet up for the freshmen in SUSTC on 20th September. It’s a two-year tradition and we put up a series of propaganda posters a week before.

There were about 100 new students (taking up over one quarter of total freshmen) coming to our meet up that day. All team members were at present to welcome them. We made a presentation to introduce synthetic biology, iGEM and our project to them and we also told them that we would be very glad if we could get help from them in Human Practice.

It’s the first time for most of them to know such terms like biobricks, CAS9, guide RNA and so on. They listened carefully and. After the presentation, many students showed great curiosity and interest. They asked us many questions and we answered them in detail.

After the meet up, many students stayed and asked for opportunities to join the iGEM team next year. There are two enthusiastic freshmen help us with human practice as volunteers.

Team Communications

• July

We had a meeting with SZU-China on 19th July just after deciding the project. They made a banner especially for us and gave us a warm welcome. We presented two projects in sequence and gave each other valuable suggestions.

It’s their first time to join in the whole iGEM family, so we then talked about the experience in establishing an iGEM team and doing project.

• August

The Second Conference
We attended the 2nd iGEM Conference held by NCTU_Formosa. In the conference, every team had 20 minutes to present their projects and 10-minnute Q&A section. The professors and iGEMers present gave many suggestions to the team which was doing presentation. And we also had poster section to explain our projects to iGEMers who are interested face to face. We had a great time there and learned a lot from other teams. We developed deep friendship with other teams and kept in touch closely since then.

Meet up in SUSTC
SCUT and Shenzhen_SFLS (High School Division) came to SUSTC on 26th August. Everyone had an opportunity to introduce himself briefly. We did presentations and communicated a lot about team running. Then we showed them our lab and went for a short tour in our campus.

[SCUT wiki about this]

• September

XMU-China came to visit us on 17th September. We had a thorough evening talk about human practice and team running. We showed them our lab and our campus the day after.

[XMU-China wiki about this]

• October

We communicated with SJTU-Software about their software online. We consulted team members of SUSTC-ShenzhenB (Software team) last year, and gave them some suggestions.

[SJTU-Software wiki about this]

Team Cooperation

With SZU-China

In our communications with SZU-China in July, we gave them several suggestions such as involving suicide system in the circuit design to enhance safety. Since it’s their first time to attend iGEM, we shared the experience about team building and registering and helped them to get familiar with metal requirements.
We consulted them how to use of flow cytometry and freeze-dry machine.
[here for detailed information]

With SJTU-Software

We helped SJTU-Software to test their software, recorded the testing video and took the photos. And we also gave the suggestions as following:
a.Improve server response speed;
b.Add log output;
c.Grateful Shutdown and Exception Handling;
d.Use native code in GUI components, which should be significantly faster and more flexible in comparison to Swing;
[here for detailed information]