Team:CityU HK/HumanPractice

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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 arising topic in the field of Biotechnology. When every Synthetic Biologist or iGEMer is working hard for their masterpieces, at the same time, we should promote Synthetic Biology to public. Society is always the key factor for the development of new Science discipline or subject like Synthetic Biology. This is because what we are doing will bring direct effects to the public and that is what people are always concerning.


Therefore, in order to gain support and belief from public and thus encourage the development of Synthetic Biology, we have the responsibility to objectively tell the society what is going on with Synthetic Biology and iGEM competition. We believe that educating the students is the most powerful tool to build up a positive image of Synthetic Biology, especially when they are young. So we targeted high school students with Science background for our human practice outreach.

What we have done

We delivered a presentation on Synthetic Biology and iGEM competition to our local high school students. We aimed


1. To teach students more about Genetics.


2. To give a clearer picture of Synthetic Biology to Secondary School students.


3. To raise the interest of students in field of Biotechnology.


4. More importantly, to build up a bridge between Secondary students and modern Biology.


Basically, in our sharing, we told them what is iGEM competition, what do the iGEMers ‘invent’, how is CityU_HK’s project, what is the essence of Synthetic Biology and also introduce some safety concerns on this subject. Please find our presentation materials on this link. Surely you will have fun of it!

Survey

We also designed a set of survey for our audiences to fill in after listening to our tiny talk. The survey was designed based on the aims. Through the survey results, we can see if our outreach achieved our aims. We reached a local secondary school and visited a class of high school Biology students on 18/8/2014. Also, we invited two group of high school Science students to visit our laboratory on 17/7/2014 and 18/7/2014. Totally, 55 students were promoted by our team.

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!