Edutainment on Campus

Summary

Synthetic Biology is never a traditional discipline and we do not want to spread the knowledge in a traditional way. During the semester, we managed to spread the knowledge of Synthetic Biology to the students of biological and non-biological majors in SJTU, through a series of activities, combined of both education and entertainment.

Background

Synthetic Biology is a new area of biological research and technology in the 21st century that combines science and engineering. It encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies, and disciplines with a variety of definitions.The common goal is the design and construction of new biological functions and systems not found in nature.

In most universities in China, there have not been specific courses for this new branch of biology, either have there in SJTU. Because of its comprehensiveness that requires knowledge of biology, information theory and computer simulation, BioCraft opened a special course that advocate Synthetic Biology to students of both biological and non-biological majors on campus.

Fun Competition of Basic Biological Knowledge

On March 21st, we held a big examination of basic biolodical knowledge participated by the undergraduates of on-biological students of SJTU and ECNU(East China Normal University) in collaboration with the Students’ Union of Life Science and Biotechnology School.

Fig.1 : The Propaganda Poster of the Fun Competition(left) and The self-designed T-Shirt as gifts for all the participants

About 230 students registered and took the exam. All the participants got our self-designed T-shirts as souvenirs and the top 50 scorers got the chance to do someinteresting biological experiments in the teaching laboratory of Life Science and Biotechnology School.

Fig.2 : Thelively registration site in the central square in SJTU

Lecture Collection

Every month during the semester, we delivera lectureabout Synthetic Biology facing the SJTU students from different departments.

The content of the lectures is distinct from those given to the high school students and is more sophisticated. And there is a discussion section as part of the activity to probe into the industrialization, biosafety and bioethics issues of Synthetic Biology.

Each time’s lecture held in the past attracted a huge number of students either passionate or just curious about modern biology and many of them have joined in our BioCraft club.

Fig.4 : The leader of SJTU-BioX-Shanghai iGEM team, Rui Xi, is introducing the knowledge framework of Synthetic Biology in one of the lectures

Pop Music Kuso

In the middle of June, after the iGEM team had determined what they wanted to do in this year’s project, we posted an introduction that explains our idea and design onto the campus BBS and required to rewrite a pop song according to the projects. In less than two weeks, we collected dozens of rewritten versions of different pop songs, such as Rolling in the Lab adapted from Rolling in the Deep, That Makes It Faster adapted from What makes you beautiful and many other enjoyable ones. Finally we chose one of them whose lyrics most matched our idea and was very much rhymed.

The song was adapted from Call Me Maybe, one of the most popular songs in 2012 and newly named as Membrane Magic, the same as the tile of our project.We decided to use it as our team song and made a simple funny music video.

Fig.5 : Some screenshots of our music video We have already posted the video onto Youtube and Youku