Introduction

This summer we were busy introducing synthetic biology and our software to freshmen of our school and high school students as well as other people. We promoted synthetic biology and iGEM mainly by giving lectures, uploading a video and making brochure. The publicity of synthetic biology has a long way to go. And we are on the way.

Lecture

Shenzhen Experimental Senior High

In Sep 25th, we went to Shenzhen Experimental High School to give the students there a lecture, and we answered their interesting questions.

The public course included the history of synthetic biology, and we described it in a simple way for them to understand. Then we talked about the basic idea and knowledge of synthetic biology, and helped them to understand how we can build a new circuit (Link to technical standard 2). After that, we focused on the safety and humanity of this new subject, which is the most important part to let average people accept this mysterious thing. The last part was about iGEM, and this was the most interesting part; those students were very interested about it.

They arose a lot of questions, such as “Why do we need to use E. coli to be the basic part of synthetic biology”, and “Has a project been commercialized”. We answered these questions in detail.

And they showed lots of interests in iGEM high school competition. We gave them our brochures, so the students who didn’t have the chance to take part in the public course could know and learn things about synthetic biology and iGEM.

Shenzhen Senior High School

In Sep 26th, we went to Shenzhen Senior High to give the students there a public course. What is more, we had a communication with their teachers and we finally had a common view of cooperation in synthetic biology in the future.

The public course was just the same as we had in Shenzhen Experimental Senior High. Later, we had a very cheerful conversation with their teachers that they tried our software and we decided to have a cooperation of popularizing synthetic biology in their school in the future. That’s a big step of popularizing synthetic biology in Shenzhen, because they are the best high school here, and they can lead other schools to know and learn about synthetic biology.

SUSTC freshmen

In Sep 11th, we had a public course in our university. The public course was still the same as we had two High Schools, including history of synthetic biology, the basic idea and knowledge of synthetic biology, how we can build a new circuit, the safety and humanity of this new subject and iGEM competition.

What’s more, we gave these interested students a course about the details of experiment and knowledge, and we invited our professors, He Jiankui, to give them more guiding. Of course, we let some freshmen join our team, in order to let them know the working environment of iGEM and cultivated them to be the leader of next year.

Open course online

This year we invited our advisor Qie Boyu to upload a new open course about interesting synthetic biology to YouTube. This video could let rookies be more interested in synthetic biology and iGEM. And we made the open course livelier and easier to understand. So we believe that more and more people who have watched our video would develop an interest in iGEM and synthetic biology.

Brochure

In order to let more people know about synthetic biology, we made a brochure about synthetic biology and gave out it to citizens in various occasions. Many students and teachers who have read our brochure showed that they wanted to join in this amazing world. And we have used two different languages so that the foreigners in Shenzhen can also understand it without any problems.