Team:CityU HK/HumanPractice
From 2014.igem.org
Human Practice
We educated secondary school kids about synthetic biology and the safety issues. We also conducted a survey on understanding of synthetic biology in public.
Introduction
Synthetic Biology is certainly an emerging topic of importance sin the field of Biotechnology. While every Synthetic Biologist or iGEMer is working hard on their masterpiece, at the same time, we should also promote Synthetic Biology to the general public. Society is always a key factor for the development of a new Science discipline or subject like Synthetic Biology. This is because what we are doing has a positive impact on society.
In order to gain greater support and trust from public and promote the development of Synthetic Biology, we have the responsibility to objectively inform the society the recent advances in Synthetic Biology and the iGEM competition. We believe that educating high school students is the one of the most powerful means to build up a positive image of Synthetic Biology. For this reason, we have approached local high school students in our human practice outreach.
What we have done
We delivered a seminar on Synthetic Biology and the iGEM competition to our local high school students. We aimed:
1. To teach students more about Genetics.
2. To give a clearer picture about Synthetic Biology to Secondary School students.
3. To raise the awareness and interest of students in the field of Biotechnology.
4. To build a knowledge base for Secondary students in the field of Synthetic Biology.
Basically, in our sharing, we provided information about the iGEM competition and the past inventions of the iGEMers, background about the CityU HK iGEM project, the essence of Synthetic Biology and some safety concerns in the field of Synthetic Biology. Please find our presentation materials on this link. We hope you will have a lot of fun exploring our wiki!
Survey
We have also designed a set of survey questions for our audiences to fill in after listening to our seminar. The survey was designed based on the aims of the talk. Through the survey results, we can see if our outreach has achieved our aims. We visited and presented a seminar to a class of high school Biology students on 18/8/2014. Also, we invited two groups of high school Science students to visit our iGEM laboratory on 17/7/2014 and 18/7/2014. In total, 55 students attended and participated in our iGEM workshop.
What did the students think?
We had also raised a question to ask for any idea to create a new biological machine. Here were their feedbacks:
We could see that our audiences were open-minded to Synthetic Biology. They thought it was a positive thing and they would also like to participate in this great event! All of them also got potential to be a Synthetic Biologists because their ideas were creative, out of our expectation!
Copyright © iGEM CityU HK 2014. All Rights Reserved