Team:USTC-Software/HumanPractices
Science and Technology Week
Science and Technology Week is an on-campus annually celebration of science, technology, and engineering involving different colleges students in USTC conducting various science-based activities. This year, Science and Technology Week attracted over ten thousand citizens to USTC, varying from innocent pupils, high school students and college students in biology-related majors to the public from all walks who may have limited knowledge of Synthetic Biology. Our team cooperated with Team USTC and offered visitors a feast of biological knowledge.
We introduced elementary knowledge of genetics to citizens by poster presentation, then showed them some basic experiment operation, like liquid relief, centrifugation and etc. We used metaphors of LEGO and principle of programming to introduce the concept of biobricks and Synthetic Biology. In addition, we distributed questionnaires to the visitors to get some feedback to improve the design idea of our software.
Asia-Pacific Conference in Taiwan
We attended International Genetically Engineered Machine Conference held by National Cheng Kung University from August 8th to 14th 2016. Over 20 iGEM teams attended the conference and 6 members of our team was sent to Taiwan.
During the conference, the iGEMers communicated, changed ideas and learned from one another. The conference is not only a simple warm-up for the upcoming world championship in Boston, but an Asian regional platform for teams from different countries to exchange ideas and explore synthetic biology as well. All the teams made a project presentation and introduced their projects. In this way, we received useful feedbacks and technology-improvement suggestions from students and professors of other teams.
We are so grateful to be invited and glad to have a chance to communicate with other teams in Taiwan.
Alpha Version Trial for Schoolmates
Before we have collected our data of questionnaires form the Science and Technology Week, we did not come up that a simulator should be programmed into our software. However, the result of the survey showed that over 40% of participants both were in the major of biology and wanted to have a program to analyze the concentrations of several interacting substances in a biological reaction. Some participants told us that solving them manually was often a harsh job and there might probably be miscalculations in the result, which was a huge cost of time. We paid attention to this demand. Therefore we asked our programmers to design the module "Simulation" and module "BLAST" which was exactly made for those who want to delegate this time-consuming work to machines.
To find out whether our improvement above is useful or not, in September we packed up an alpha version distributing to schoolmates whose major is biology. We introduced them to Biohub and its basic usage. After they had used this software for a while, most of them reported that it was quite useful, so was the Module:Simulation.
While, this time several students told us that the solution function of the simulation may be unstable after a certain period of time, he wondered if we can find out the critical point which divided the stable state and the unstable one. We are convinced that it should be concerned. Thus we worked it out soon. At the second time biology students used our software, more of them approved it. Some users became optimistic on our project and expected for the issuance of a formal version.
