Overview

"Teach according to the student's ability."

To make our education more effective, we divided it into two parts, according to the audience's different knowledge reserves.

- For people without biological knowledge background, our activities focus on introducing synbio and popularizing sugar substitutes, aiming to let the public understand synthetic biology and realize the importance of healthy diets.

- For people with background knowledge in biology, we will delve into cutting-edge technology and application examples of synthetic biology, demonstrating its potential in solving real-world problems in conjunction with our project design.

Through these educational activities, we hope to break down knowledge barriers, letting more people participate in shaping and contributing to synbio, and jointly promoting the development of this interdisciplinary field.

People without bioknowledge

Local primary school students

In April, a group of primary school students visited our lab, and we guided them to propose an interesting synthetic biology project using the paradigm of synthetic biology thinking. Some students proposed to transfer DNA from other fruits into specific fruits to get the experience of eating multiple fruits at one time and increase the nutritional value of the fruits, while others hoped to make human beings grow wings through gene editing... We hope to make them realize that biology is not just the WAY we know the world, but also the TOOL to transform it.

Hope Primary School Students

We want to carry out education activities in a wider range of people, inspired by SDG equality education, we contacted a Hope primary school sponsored by a Shenzhen enterprise, these primary school students come from remote villages in Yunnan, they came to our lab and did a small experiment that we prepared, "Extracting banana DNA with detergent". We hope they have a preliminary understanding of synthetic biology and become interested in it.

Picture Book

We created a fun and informative picture book on sugar substitutes to show the public the potential of synthetic biology to solve problems. We brought the book into primary schools and read it with students. After reading the book, we designed a knowledge competition based on the content, and the top 3 children received our merchandise as a prize.

Laboratory Safety Video

In order to popularise lab safety in a more popular and interesting way, we filmed a lab safety education video and uploaded it to bilibili, where our video was viewed 2k+ times.

Clubs Carnival

We were invited by the Federation of School Clubs to participate in the Clubs Carnival. Our SWEETEIN booth prepared science illustrated books and pamphlets for everyone to read, and after reading, they could participate in a quick quiz game. Most of the participants were able to correctly answer the questions related to sugar substitutes in the game session after reading the science information, and they were all rewarded with fans, hair cards and other merchandise prepared by us.

Biosafety science event

In August, we went into Nantou Ancient City, a famous tourist attraction in Shenzhen, to participate in a biosafety science event organized by SUSTech-Med, where we introduced the history of the development of sugar substitutes and its safety assessment, and we prepared interactive games to encourage the public to pay attention to biosafety.

People with bioknowledge

Introducing iGEM

For those who already have some background knowledge of biology, our education event started with an introduction to iGEM as well as synbio. Our PI introduced the history of iGEM and the team history of SZU-China to the students of the College of Life and Oceanography, encouraging them to take an active interest in, and sign up for, iGEM, and get involved in synthetic biology.

Synbio Experience Sharing Session

Next, we expanded our education audience to include high school students, our team members returned to their high school alma maters to educate graduating students about synthetic biology, promote iGEM, and encourage them to become igemers.

Synbio Talk

To sing high praise for biosafety, we participated in a synbio talk hosted by CityU as a guest lecturer. This workshop aims to introduce synthetic biology to secondary school students in an easy, engaging, interactive, and applicable approach. Therefore, we introduce our project, what case we want to tackle and explain the usefulness of synthetic biology for the community.

Foreign Students

We received foreign students from the summer camp of Shenzhen University and introduced them to the history of synthetic biology, focusing on the differences between synthetic biology and traditional biology, given that they had previously been exposed to top-down traditional biology research ideas.

Freshman Outreach

After the Class of 2028 enrolled, we conducted an outreach campaign aiming to popularise synthetic biology as well as the igem competition to students new to the university, and 100+ people joined our recruiting inquiry group, with new students from different backgrounds such as Maths, Physics, Economics, and Marine Science wanting to become igemers.