Human Practice

University Students - Hong Kong

Freshmen Booth in Art Fair
We opened a booth for freshmen in a university event. It is aimed to promote iGEM and synthetic biology to recruit next year’s team members. Other than that, we explain our project ideas, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon as well as Benzo[a]pyrene hazards and get their response through surveys.

To make a chain distribution of information, we published a mini-comic about iGEM and synthetic biology with amusing bacteria characters. Aside from printed version, we also have an online version published. The mini-comic comes in two languages, English and Chinese. The information is pretty basic because we want to attract people’s attention and let them know what it is. Let alone some non-science and non-engineering students also visited our booth.

There is a QR code on our stickers that direct to our online version of the comic. Thus, when people stick the sticker on, others around them may find the bacteria characters intriguing and check on the comic by scanning the code. More and more people in the campus will know about iGEM by then.

Survey Analysis: CUHK (Hong Kong) Students at Freshman Booth (110 students)

Firstly, we explore how well they know about iGEM and synthetic biology.

 

The result shows that some people know what iGEM and synthetic biology is but large proportions of them do not know what they are.

In relation to our project, we review whether they have heard of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon or Benzo[a]pyrene.

In spite of its carcinogenicity, most of the respondents do not know what Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon or Benzo[a]pyrene are.

We investigate their response towards our project ideas.

Interesting and useful are the most common response that we got. This encourages us further to work out all our best in doing the project.

Beyond home, religion has been a great issue for synthetic biology. Interestingly,
50% Hong Kong’ population are non-believers or having other minority beliefs. The correlation between religious beliefs to acceptability of synthetic biology among the university students is illustrated below.

The results indicated that, there is various insight of synthetic biology among different religious belief. Non-believers most welcome synthetic biology well.

The results from religion and personal point of view are similar. This shows that high school student’s view on synthetic biology relates directly to their religious belief.

Lastly, we assess their response on the comic.

 

The comic attracted the readers well as the majority rated it 3 or 4 for being interesting.

 

The comic delivers the content properly to make the reader understand.

The comic has successfully improved reader’s understanding on both iGEM and synthetic biology.