Team:NCTU Formosa/HP/Gold

To qualify the criteria for the gold medal in human practices, we have categorized our human practices in an organized way.

Human Practices for Gold Medal

Judging Criteria

Expand on your gold medal activity by demonstrating how you have integrated the investigated issues into the design and/or execution of your project.

Our Human Practices

For qualifying the criteria of the gold medal in Human Practices, we expanded the human practice activities from acquiring the general opinions that reflect on related issues to integrated human practices that help us calibrate the project design and execution in a more creative and direct way.

Here are the human practices well-tailored for the extended human practices. The context elaborating on the details of each activity, please see the link.

1. Study—Expert Study

In the expert study, we have consulted two agricultural experts in National Chung Hsing University and Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute about the methods of feeding assays. The two experts have aided us in providing protocols, pest data, larvae sample that greatly facilitates the research our project.
(see more about the Expert Study)

2. Study—User Study

The users of our system are farmers. So we have consulted organic farm owners in Organic Green Market to investigate their opinion and the feasibility of our project. Their feedbacks are rewarding to us for we grasped the needs of the users practically.
(see more about the User Study)

3. Education—Board Game

This year, we have created an exciting board game that not only promotes the logic of synthetic biology but also propagates the idea of our project. It is called “Gene Armageddon—The Pest Crisis.” The rule of the game is built upon biobrick construction, and the process of the game is based on the evolution. We have played the board game with iGEMers in the conferences. The feedbacks are all satisfying.
(see more about the Board Game)

4. Education—Education Workshop

This year, we have built up the first workshop for teaching senior high school students about the concept and knowledge of synthetic biology. In the two-week workshop, we included basic laboratory skills training and basic steps(e.g. plasmid extraction, Digestion, Ligation…). The students from the Science program class of Taichung First Senior High School learned and discussed the previous projects of 2015 iGEM competition fervently.
(see more about the Education Workshop)

5. Collaboration—TaiwanPP_FTP

This year, we collaborated with NYMU-Taipei iGEM team on designing software that can predict the number of pests in specific locations. Our projects both focus on the agricultural issues, so the software may be useful for both of the projects, making them more consummate.

Given that our project is meant to be practically applied to the agricultural industry, we should do some other preliminary works before commercializing it and also consider the safety regulations before turning it from the lab to the farmland.
(see more about the TaiwanPP_FTP)

6. Entrepreneurship—Business Model

To make our project more accessible to the general people, we have made a business model for the potential sponsors in the future.
(see more about the Business Model)

7. Entrepreneurship—Law and Regulation

Before turning it into a commercialized product, we should comply with the agricultural regulation. Here we have made three essential questions and answers to clarify the bio-repellent we designed.
(see more about the Law and Regulation)

8. Patent Application

Our project is in the process of applying for the patent.