Team:Tsinghua/Humanpractice

Students and Alumni

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We made a progressing, three-stage plan of introducing synthetic biology and iGEM to students and alumni.

For various reasons, we deem this part the most important of the three. First of all, we are dealing with educated and intelligent young people much like ourselves who can fully grasp the concept of synthetic biology. Second, they are the most likely to be attracted to a competition like iGEM where they can push their limits and show their talents. Third, many talented students from majors other than biology did not realize they had potential in the field of synthetic biology, where not only biologists, engineers are sorely needed as well. Last but not least, we hope to influence at least some people into taking up synthetic biology as their future career, and boost the development of the field in our country.

With this in mind, we made a progressing three-stage plan of introducing synthetic biology and iGEM to students and alumni:

Stage 1 is a general introductory phase where we attempt to attract as much attention as possible for future stages by posters.

Stage 1 is a general introductory phase where we attempt to attract as much attention as possible for future stages. We needed students to know that we exist and we are looking for people to join us; we needed to get their curiosity up so they would come to see who we are and what we are doing. To do this, we printed posters ourselves and some of the future events planned, and put them up on the poster boards in dormitories and classrooms along with other posters. Since students regularly check these poster boards for information on lectures, club meetings and such activities, we are sure to get a broad audience. We especially marked that what we were doing needed talented people from all fields, even such seemingly disparate fields as computer sciences.

Stage 2 is a more detailed introductory stage, where we introduce the concept of synthetic biology, history of iGEM and Tsinghua’s participation, etc by science fair.

For this stage, we needed a place where people would come and actually spend time listening to us explain, at least in an easy-to-understand manner, and where we could freely exchange ideas. This is why we chose the annual science fair as the platform for this stage, where people interested in science from all majors came to admire the work of other students and find inspirations of their own. We acquired a stand and made posters introducing synthetic biology and souvenirs for those who came to us and listened to our story. We were exhilarated to find some students who were really interested in our projects: a student from automation, for example, stayed around for nearly an hour looking through all of our previous projects and discussed with us all the methods and tools used in them. To encourage students like him explore deeper into synthetic biology, we gave them a stage completion badge and told them they were welcome to join us in the third stage – synthetic biology club.

Stage 3 aims to directly recruit students more interested in synthetic biology, in the form of a club – the synthetic biology club, open to students from all grades and majors.

What we hope to do is attract interested students and give them “a deeper look into the system”. We recruited some club members after the science fair, and participated in the “recruitment campaign” – an annual event for all clubs to recruit new members. We also brought our poster to Peking University during a joint meeting with the PKU team and publicized there.
With the new members eager to start, we did not disappoint them: our club activities were as diverse as they were interesting, from attending lectures to lab tours and finally lab experiments, As our members come from various majors, students from majors like automation or computer science may only know a little about biology, so we start with learning relatively simple concepts In lectures and group discussions, and gradually move on to lab tours, experiment-shadowing (following a biology student through a whole day of experiment), and finally they may even do some experiments of their own. During this process, club members gradually become more involved as their understanding of general biology and synthetic biology deepens.
Through this three-stage plan, we were able to spread the idea about synthetic biology to students from various majors, and successfully lead some of them into this field. We hope to see that next year, there will be more students from different majors taking part in iGEM.

Local Schools

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To share our understanding of synthetic biology with pre-college students, we chose local high schools to begin. We organized sessions where students were able to learn about synthetic biology and design cells of their own.

Even though we make the first part our priority, it does not mean we did not underestimate the power of pre-college education. To share our understanding of synthetic biology with kids, we chose local middle schools to begin. In our opinion, these are the best students to start with because they can adequately understand what we were talking about, and they have less pressure academically so they can do more thinking.
A typical session of ours starts with a presentation, where we briefly introduce the concepts with pictures and flash animations for easier understanding. After the presentation, we would do some games with the students, like putting bricks together to form an organism (just like putting parts together for a machine) to get the students more actively involved. Then we divide students into groups for discussions and have them debate on interesting issues. Finally, we sum up the whole session and give them take-home messages to remember the lesson.
Through our experience in schools, we found a couple of tricks that we want to share with other teams, especially teams from China. Due to cultural and educational reasons, most students are relatively shy, especially when you appear before them as “teachers”; and this often results in an awkward lack of response from them when you start asking questions. This is why we must first work the students up and make ourselves seem more friendly before actually start asking them to participate in events such as discussions. Start with games, try some jokes when they start to relax, and take notice of the more active students so you can pick on them to answer some questions. Do not start the discussion before you talked with them a bit more, if you start too early, most of the students will only sit around and wait for the session to end; this is also why you must also join their discussion, and lead them where you need.
Always remember to have fun, and do not treat this as a chore! Kids are very sensitive and they will feel it if you are not sincere, and they will not be sincere with you either. So try to really enjoy it and have fun!

Internet users

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To people of our age, internet is an almost indispensable part of our life. It is therefore necessary that we have a way of “spreading the word” online to tell even more people about synthetic biology and iGEM.

To people of our age, internet is an almost indispensable part of our life. It is therefore necessary that we have a way of “spreading the word” online to tell even more people about synthetic biology and iGEM. For internet users, the easiest and most passive way is to simply build a website and wait for people to come. We build our wiki early-on and had updated it along the way. However, with all the trillions of websites, why would people just come and click on yours? This is why we utilized other more fashionable ways of advertising: Blogs, School Website, Renren.com (the equivalent of Facebook), and Weibo (the equivalent of Twitter). We also designed an app for android that we passed around to other students.  

Collaboration

Throughout our project, we’ve had collaborations with various other iGEM teams. Such collaborations have benefitted all of us, and we would like to write it down here for future team’s reference.

Collaboration with Tsinghua-A team

The team we collaborated with the most is definitely Tsinghua-A. They proved to be very good partners, and we helped each other in many ways along the way. For example, we communicate a lot about our team project and we give many suggestions to each other. Besides, we held a joint seminar to introduce iGEM and enjoyed great success – many of the undergraduates, even some graduate students came to listen.

Collaboration with Peking team

The second team we had a lot of collaboration with is the PKU iGEM team. At the PKU team’s invitation, we attended a joint meeting to promote iGEM in PKU, and exchanged our ideas and inspirations. We learned a lot from the PKU team, and the two teams have kept a friendly relationship since. They soon returned the favor: when we needed to obtain some AHL for testing, it was also the PKU team that quickly came to our help and provided the reagents.

Collaboration with SUSTC-Shenzhen-B

We also helped some other teams with their projects. For the SUSTC-Shenzhen-B team, we helped them test their terminator efficiency calculator and offered some suggestions for improving their UI. It was a very useful tool and we helped pass their tool on to others.

Collaboration with SUSTC-Shenzhen-A

Another very interesting app we helped test was the “BioSearch” app for iOS from iGEM SUSTC-SHENZHEN-A team. We helped test its function and completed surveys to help them improve it.

In conclusion, collaboration is something an iGEM team should at least try once or twice. In such a high-end competition as iGEM, all the other competing teams have really smart and fun people, and interacting with them as a team gives experience that you will surely treasure.