Team:AHUT China/HP/Human Practice/Publicity

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Publicity

After explaining our project to friends and family, we realized the distance between the academia and the society and found that people are mostly completely unaware of what synthetic biology even is, let alone anything more specific. However, humanities and social sciences relate closely and noticeably to our everyday life, so we feel it’s the time we spread the idea of synthetic biology to the society.

Questionnaire Analysis

Ⅰ.The questionnaire shows that 96 % of people use navigation software in daily life. Concerning the existing navigation software available in the market, 91% of people point out its different disadvantages and have an expectation of a better system. With regard to the bio-navigation system, 46% of people do not know the form of storing information in DNA, 20% think the biological computing system can be applied to navigation while 19% hold the opposite opinion. Through the questionnaire analysis, we can find that people are eager for a new navigation system, supporting the development of biological computing, but knowing little about the related knowledge.

II. The questionnaire shows that people are not satisfied with the existing navigation system due to its many defects, including the high power consumption, inaccurate and incongruent pathways. So most people are looking forward to a new navigation system. Meanwhile, most people have an optimistic attitude towards biological computing of its broad prospect because it has a lot of advantages that electronic computing can not offer. However, many people don't know much about biological computing, only having heard of it or knowing little about it.

Cooperative teams or universities：

zero NULL BNU-China IIT Kharagpur HUST-China NWPU Vilnius-Lithuania NYU-AD iGEM IONIS SYSU-MEDICINE UiOslo iGEM OUC-China FAFU-CHINA XMU-CHINA SUSTC XMU-China SCAU-iGEM 2016 XMU-China ZJU-China University of Chinese Academy of Sciences SYSU_CHINA JSNU-IGEM Jilin_China HUST-China NEU-China

Meet up

At 7 pm in the evening of September 28th, 2016, we held an information session with NAU-CHINA and SYSU-MEDICINE in our university. The meeting began with the introduction of iGEM competition, then followed respectively by the presentation of NAU’s iGEM project “Spring Healer” and our project “Bio-compass 2.0”. It ended with a lecture given by Doctor Wang, who is the tutor of SYSU iGEM team. Firstly, he elaborated the required qualities to be a scientist and then he made a full presentation about SYSU’s iGEM project of this year. This lively meeting went smoothly in that night, through which many students in our university are getting to know more about iGEM competition and synthetic biology.

Science day

On the 18th of September, we presented a stall at our university as part of our scientific promotion event. This was a great chance to reach out and engage with the public and communicate science to the public.

we had created posters about synthetic biology, the iGEM competition and our topic. On that day, we got into conversation with many people and informed them about problems with our project. We also explained what synthetic biology is and where you can find products from genetically engineered organisms in everyday life. To evoke enthusiasm for science in college students, we offered them several small experiments of making organic batteries of different fruits. In the meantime, we sold some milk tea to raise funds. The feedback is that they like our experiments as well as our milk tea, which was overwhelmingly positive! Click here!

Social Media

We realized that the way to reach the most people would be by social media. So this year, in order to have the maximum possible public outreach on the topic of Bio-compass, we decided to use different media to promote our project and raise public awareness of synthetic biology. We have done a lot of work on them, which includes Sina Weibo, WeChat and Facebook. We post our progress of the project on our fan page periodically and introduce the knowledge of synthetic biology on these Internet platforms.

Our efforts proved fruitful, as we have reached 1,028 in Sina Weibo, and many teams from home abroad have also paid attention to our project.

Flashing video

We made a quick flashing video with JSNU team, which shows our energy and passion. In this way of collaboration, we are like a big family working together to let more people knowing iGEM competition.If you want to watch it, Click here!