Education & Public Engagement
High School Promotion
This year, to further popularize the basic knowledge of synthetic biology, we set our sight on high school education. After early communication and preparation, we successfully held a seminar at The Affiliated High School of Huazhong University of Science and Technology on Jan 7th with over 200 high school teachers and students presenting. On the seminar, we introduced the concept and basic knowledge of synthetic biology and iGEM and presented our 2015 iGEM project to them. Students showed great interests in our presentation and were amazed by all the novel ideas of iGEM teams in the past years. After the presentation, we sent out questionnaires to the audiences and received exciting feedbacks. These high school students said that they were introduced to a new world of biology and a new technology that they didn’t learn before in their textbooks. They asked us various questions about synthetic biology and iGEM on the questionnaires. After the seminar, we discussed with the teachers from The Affiliated High School of HUST about the possibility of forming a high school team to attend the competition. They listened to our suggestions and felt promising to form a new team in the future.
Since then, we also invited some students to our lab several times, taught basic laboratory skills and the progress of our Filter project. Hopefully next year we’ll have a new iGEM high school team in the Giant Jamboree!
Communication
"iGEM HUST-Cheering!" Conference
This year, we successfully held the first “iGEM HUST-Cheering!” conference. After over four months’ preparation, the conference was held on July 8th and 9th. We invited NCTU_FORMOSA, Nanjing-China, HAZU-China, NUDT-China, Jilin_China, ShanghaiTech_ChinaB and WHU-China to the conference. During the two-day conference, we not only kept the traditional forms of presentation and poster session, but also designed fun activities to expand attendees’ understanding and critical thinking of the development of synthetic biology and iGEM. Those activities included free debate about the better research method of synthetic biology, “Quiz King” (synthetic biology Q&A competition), and iGEM life salon.
It is worth mentioning that, before the conference, many attendees were under great pressure of doing experiment and other preparation for the Jamboree. During the conference, this pressure might even be deepened by listening to other teams’ presentations and, possibly, the terrible weather condition in Wuhan. But these fun activities significantly expelled the worried looks on attendees’ faces. Especially in the final part of iGEM life salon, Professor Chen Wenliang from NCTU_Formosa shared his idea of “enjoy science”. He reminded us that whether win a medal or not was not important comparing to whether you had fun in this experience. It was more convincing with a positive attitude and a smile on your face to show the judge that you had benefited a lot from this experience. And with this attitude, it wouldn’t be hard at all to fulfill the project and claim a medal. All the attendees were deeply moved by this idea and the true meaning of iGEM become clear to us. This conference was really a “cheer-up” for us as both host and also for all the attendees. It gave us inspirations on changing perspective in our work both inside and outside the lab.
Meetup with NWPU
NWPU is a new-found iGEM team this year. We had a small meetup with them on May 22th and shared our experience in team organizing, training, project preparing and some tips on attending the Giant Jamboree abroad.
Three-school iGEM Conference in Wuhan
After the frequent communications and collaboration last year, we had established Wuhan iGEM Committee with HAZU-China and WHU-China. Earlier this year, on April 17th, members from the three teams met together at HUST. We exchanged our preliminary ideas of our 2016 project and discussed the matters on interlab collaboration among three teams.
