Team:Peking/HumanPractice/SowingTomorrowSyntheticBiologists/FormingAlliance

In order to enhance high school students' awareness, we decided to give a series of lectures "Life as Machines --- Rational Design for Artificial Biological Systems", presenting the basic concept and research methods of Synthetic Biology and introducing affairs of the iGEM HS Division. How to get in touch with all of the high schools in Beijing? How to ensure our propagation of Synthetic Biology to students to be a long-term project, rather than an one-off activity? Beijing Teenager Science & Technology Club came to our mind.

One of our teammates, Xiong Hongyu, has been an avid member in the club and still enjoys its atmosphere of studying science and technology, listening to lectures given by university professors, and taking part in field trips all around the world. Since the ultimate purpose of Beijing Teenager Science & Technology Club is inspiring students' interest in science and providing a platform for them to fulfill their own proposals, with similar intention, we have decided to seek for an ally with the Beijing Teenager Science & Technology Club.

Figure 4. On June 20th, we went to the office of the Beijing Teenager Science & Technology Club, and gave a presentation to teachers in all high schools in Beijing.

On June 20th, some of us went to the office of the Beijing Teenager Science & Technology Club, and gave a presentation to Ms Zhou Lin, the Chief Secretary of the club and all other teachers who are responsible for the science affairs of their own schools. The presentation was very successful! The teachers not only realized the basic ideas of Synthetic Biology and the concept of iGEM, but also they figured out the long-term potential of this subject, and the meaning of iGEM to students --- motivating them to study Synthetic Biology in a collaboratary and interdisciplinary atmosphere and to become excellent synthetic biologists in the future.

Ms Zhou Lin rejoicingly told us that she was impressed by our efforts on spreading nowadays science frontiers to the young generation of students and decided to ally with Peking iGEM from now on and help us accomplish the goal of "Sowing Tomorrow Synthetic Biologists".

In order to ensure our lecture to hold without impediment, Ms Zhou agreed to offer a hall for us. Furthermore, the teachers from all high schools in Beijing said that they were very glad to help inform their students to attend our lecture, and they even took all the propagation materials we prepared for the lecture, including the fliers and guiding brochure we made for students with interests.

Figure 6. Poster of our lecture "Life as machines --- Rational Design for Artificial Biological Systems".

Figure 5. In order to guide high school students to take part in the iGEM HS-Division competition, we organized all the related material and made a brochure for the competition. We gave the brochures to the students for propagation before and after our lectures.