Team:KoreaSonyeodul/Human Practices

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  • COLLABORATIONS
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  • COLLABORATIONS
  • DESIGN
  • EXPERIMENTS
  • PROOF
  • DEMONSTRATE
  • RESULTS
  • NOTEBOOK
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  • BASIC
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  • PUBLIC OUTREACH
  • ETHICS
  • COLLABORATION
  • INTEGRATED PRACTICES
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  • Gold Medal
  • Silver Medal
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Human Practice

Main Subtitle

Campaign 1

The first thing that came to our team’s mind after pondering about how we should apply our project to the real world was campaign. The idea of our campaign was simple: to make people become aware of the situation. Our team designed two steps to further elaborate the plan. Regarding that we all lived in dormitory, the sphere of activity was confined to our school.
The first plan required participation of our school’s students. For three trash baskets in our school, we indicated a different basket only for plastic. After two weeks, our teammates gathered every plastic basket that we put and sorted the trash just in case there were wastes other than plastic. The image below is the how the waste baskets looked when we put it together.

After we were done sorting, we packed plastics for our next step.
The next step was the crux of our campaign. For our project of IGEM fundamentally aimed for seeking ways to save the environment, we designed our next step to appeal to many students as possible of our project. We believed environment was something that all people should be concerned with. Our team created posters that showed the dire situation of ocean wastes such as Great Pacific Garbage Patch. To visualize, we placed the plastics that we gathered on an open space of our school. Students were able to see what we were doing and our team explained to the students of our project.

The first campaign was successful in starting our project with participation of many students. We believe the essence of was in making people aware of the situation. Our team hopes this campaign will be a starting point for contributing further to any environmental activities.

Campaign 2

Children are becoming the leading members of the society in the future, thus our team felt the necessity of alarming the students about the negative impact of plastic on environment and the solution to the problem: meal-worms. Our team requested an educational institute for the gifted in Hankuk University of Foreign Studies to give a lecture to the students about the deleteriousness of plastic and the bacteria. As a result, about twenty students participated in the lecture in September 3rd. Jungeun and Seunghee made the lecture, mainly introducing the mechanism of meal-worm decomposing plastic. We showed and explained the mechanism of meal-worms’ digesting polystyrene. In addition, we offered the students the opportunity to touch and observe meal-worms.

Campaign 3

On the Hankuk Academy of Foreign Studies official Spanish News website, Seunghee Han posted an article about the mealworms digestion mechanism and the potential effect on Earth. The news website is highly accessible which means that a lot of Hispanic people could also know about this bio-biodegradability of mealworms. Also, these newspaper is printed and distributed to Hankuk Academy of Foreign Studies meaning that more students would know about the mealworms' ability.

Fundraising

Funding was a vital factor in sustaining our project; there was many restraints that our team had as high school students. Among various human practices that we progressed throughout several months, funding was one of the most important gains that we had. One of the most obvious means to engage the public in the project was funding: a mean for the public to directly support us. Our team searched for few websites that could provide us an opportunity to let public know of our project, and fund us if they were interested in it. Tumblbugand Indiegogo provided us a chance to present our project to the public. For this, we appealed to the public by stressing what good deeds we are doing to the environment, by creating a better system of plastic degrading through bioengineering. The result of the funding surely indicated that many people were engaged in our project, and wanted to be a part of it; the first day we launched our funding, over $1,000 was funded which was over our final goal. Our funding project was shared over Facebook and twitter for about 200 times. There were also comments that gave supporting messages. Not only did our team engage in funding, but we also gained support from companies who were interested in our project. OCI, one of the leading companies in promoting green energy and chemical technologies, lend a hand to be our sponsor in funding, and also providing a laboratory in Sungnam-Si whenever we need a place to conduct an experiment.