Introduction

The Biology Research Team of UCCKE has been been promoting science in UCCKE with our full dedication. The following activities is what we have done in the past year to both the team and the fellow student of our school in aim to cultivate a research and scientific atmosphere in UCCKE and to let students develop their potential in Science.

Weekly Course (Coverage: 45 students)

The weekly course is held every single monday at 16:30-17:30 for both biology research team members and anyone who is interested. The course covers a compressive content of synthetic biology and science through both theory mentoring and wet laboratory work. The content taught in this series of course are as follow.

1. Principle of Science
2. Principle of Synthetic Biology
3. Techniques of Synthetic Biology (With wet-lab experience)
1. 3A Assembly
2. Transformation
3. Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)
4. Gel Electrophoresis
5. Laboratory safety
6. Laboratory skills and Preparation

The course has received very positive feedback from our student too. The course have grown from a total participant of 12 to around 45 participants (including staff members) and is currently one of the most famous Co-Curricular Activities in our school, attracting a lot of newcomers every year. We are working on building a much larger team and creating a stronger bond between the teammates.

For every topic mentioned before, we created a set of teaching materials including fact sheet, worksheet, protocol and quizes. We do this to ensure that they will understand and remember those techniques easily. The following image is a part of our fact sheet for transformation. A link to download all materials in zip format is provided below the image.

3 Sharings to students (Coverage: 950 students)

We often hold public sharing on science, particularly synthetic biology, to the fellow students and teachers in our school. What we have done over the years is fruitful and have definitely match our aim to cultivate a research and science atmosphere in UCCKE. Here is a list of activities with details of what we have done in the past year.

Activities	Details
Science talks to student (Coverage: whole school ~950 students)	We have held two talks in the school assembly in this year on 20 and 24/10/2016. On 20/10/2016, we have invited Team:Hong_Kong_HKU to come over and share about their experience joining iGEM on the school assembly to the fellow student. On 24/10/2016, the iGEM team member of our school present our project to the fellow students on the assembly. We didn’t only present our project to them, we also told them what science or research really is. Our presentation successfully made students to have more interest to learn more about research.
Science game booth (Coverage: ~200 students)	Our school held the Academic week every single year around the mid December. Last year, we held public exhibition booth in the common area of our school, introducing synthetic biology to fellow students and teachers. We have set up a black box with pGLO-transformed green fluorescent E.Coli [1] and Non-transformed E.Coli [2] in LB Agar plates for visitors to witness the pGLO expressed in Green Fluorescent Protein. To make it more interesting, We streak the E.Coli on the LB Agar in a special pattern like emojis and cartoon characters. It received overwhelming feedback from some junior form students saying that they have never thought of science being such cute.
Experiment session with primary school students (Coverage: 50 students)	We have an undeniable passion to share our love of science to the youth because they are going to be the new major force in the future. Kau Yan School, being one of our closely related Primary school, was invited to come over and enjoy a one day science camp in our school for their Primary 5 students. We decided to carry out a DNA Extraction experiment with them and they simply have a blast with it.

The course has received very positive feedback from our student too. The course have grown from a total participant of 12 to around 45 participants (including staff members) and is currently one of the most famous Co-Curricular Activities in our school, attracting a lot of newcomers every year. We are working on building a much larger team and creating a stronger bond between the teammates.

Sharing to parents of our school (Coverage: 10 students, 15 parents)

As we sincerely hope that synthetic biology can be promoted to the general public, we held a sharing session to parents of our school on 30th of October. During the session, we introduced iGEM to them, including with why our school is sending students to attend the competition and how can they support us, of course, we also told them about the details of our project. This activity not only let them know about us or about iGEM but also let parents to have a understanding of what research actually is and they will also like their children to join our team.

Core Team Member Training (Coverage: 15 students)

During the summer vacation (July to August)this year while preparing for this project, the core team( including the iGEM team and other interested student from the Biology Research Team) received training from the experts of handling C.Elegans, one of the research interest of this project, to learn more about C.Elegans and the method of handling them, such as synchronisation, picking up C.Elegans under dissecting microscope. They also did some discussion with us about the significance of the data we have collected during the Assay test. [3]

Local competition (Coverage: 30 students)

As we hope to develop student’s full potential in science, we also encourage our school’s students to join local science competition. Therefore, we have joined the “The Hong Kong Student Science Project 2016”(SSPC 2016) [4] to let students get a feel of what competitive science exhibition would be like. We have a total of 3 teams competing including 1 junior team and 2 senior team. The junior team [5]focus on how to convert air pollutants, such as SO2 and NO2/NO,into fertilizers. For the 2 senior team],we focuses on BioPrinting, with one team working on the engineering part [5] and another team focussing on the the printing material[6], we have successfully build a workable BioPrinter that can print a cube of E.Coli and Gelatin. Although we didn’t win any prizes, this is still a cherishable experience and have given us a precious experience to talk to a lot of other teams, exchanging ideas and experience.

Reference

[1]: HKUST, Professor King L. Chow, Available at: http://www.ust.hk/about-hkust/senior-adm/director-interdisciplinary-programs-office/ (Accessed: 7th October 2016).