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.

A successfull course must not only have well prepared leaders and teaching materials, we believe good preperation is also a key to success. Therefore, we have very detailed time table planning on what do we do each week to teach them. The following 2 images are samples of our timetable of Transformation and 3A Assembly. All timetables are in the zip file mensioned above.

The following images are taken during our course.

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 and Non-transformed E.Coli 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.

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) 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 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 and another team focussing on the the printing material, 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.

Facebook Page (Coverage: 250 people)

We created a Facebook account to release news about our team in order to promote and let others know more about our team and more about synthetic biology. Having an average view of 200 people per post, we will continue posting high quality informations in our page even after the conpetition.

YouTube Channel (Coverage: 700 people)

We created a YouTube Channel UCCKE_iGEM, featuring the videos relating to our project and the promotion of our team. People can know more about our project and team by watching the videos. They can also comment on our video to express their views about our project. This platform enables us to do better in our project and let the public know more about synthetic biology.

Questionaire (Coverage: 100 people and the government)

Background Information

As a group of science enthusiast,we are always very curious to see how different people would think about scientific research, especially in Hong Kong. As Hong Kong is a highly commercialised city, new risky, or to be more precise,capital consuming ideas might not be favoured. Under such circumstance, we would like carry out an investigation to see student’s attitude toward scientific research and their opinion on government’s new Innovation and Technology Bureau which is established in the November of 2015. We designed this 2 main direction of as we hope to know more about scientific research in Hong Kong and general public perceive them. After the results are recorded, we will send our report to the Hong Kong Government for their further reference.

What we’ve done

As we hope to find out the real thoughts of the respondents, we conduct a private, anonymous questionnaire to ask for their opinions.

The questionnaire consist of three part which are Personal Information, About the Innovation and Technology Bureau and Generally about Hong Kong Government. In a total of 14 question, multiple choice questions and opinion-seeking question takes up 9 and 5 respectively. The overall expected time for the respondent to finish the questionnaire is about 10 minutes.It was conducted in an online format via Google form as it can the results collected will be feedback to us automatically with graphs and and data ready to be used and it’s simplicity of its overall layout.

The questionnaire created mainly revolves around the respondent's opinion on the Innovation and Technology Bureau, the general impression on the government support for scientific research and their own level of interest for scientific research. There are are overlapping questions to check whether the respondents are self contradicting.

Discussion

After we have invited people to fill the questionnaire, we have received 47 responses from different people. Since the very majority of the respondent is student, 95.7% of the respondent is student, the results is mostly showing the student’s opinion. The rate of student’s parent working in the research field is also low, at only 6.4%. This is expected since being a researcher as occupation in Hong Kong receive a generally low salary,which translate to the difficulties to sustain the family.

As for student’s cognition for the new Innovation and Technology Bureau, nearly 75 % of respondent did know what it is. For the 75% respondent who recognize what it is, 40%of people think that the Bureau has fulfilled its aim to Strengthen support for the innovation and technology sector where Strengthen support for the innovation and technology sector come in next, at 23.4%. We are honestly very surprised by this as the bureau is not too famous in hong Kong as it is too new and that not much policy has been made.

However, the response for Hong Kong government financial support to scientific research is more mixed as the the the data collected shows that about 55%of respondent does think the financial support for scientific research is enough. Respondents did not show a strong tendency in agree or disagree. We also ask for their reason to choose for the option. The response is mainly about the vast number of project that the government is subsidising will share the capital that the government has invested.

We also ask the respondent to suggest some possible ways to promote scientific research. For providing economic support for research projects, it shows that there are no significant difference between the the the points that people comment. However we can still conclude that most people think this strategy is moderately to highly effective. For the holding talks and forum, most people think it is moderately effective. For promotion in public area, most people think it is moderately effective. For the promotion on social media, most people think it is highly effective.

Lastly, we ask respondent whether they will support local research by donating, more than one third of people feel comfortable with donating money to scientific research. It seems very promising as the general public seem to accept scientific research in a fashion that they will donate money. In addition to that we ask respondent how likely they are going to participate in a future scientific research. Again to our surprise, more than 70% of the respondent says that they are moderately to highly possible to be involved in a scientific research in the future. Consider the fact that most of the respondent’s parent are not researchers, we think that the influence caused by the surrounding people is low. In fact, we think what is more likely to be a reason is the sufficient and comprehensive STEM(Science,Technology,Engineering and Mathematics) education in our school and in Hong Kong. This is because the Secondary school curriculum includes STEM as a compulsory subjects from Secondary 1 to Secondary 3, and elective subjects for Secondary 4 to Secondary 6.

Conclusion

As a conclusion the the questionnaire conducted, we think that Hong Kong government has done a fairly good job in terms supporting the scientific research. We think that the government has done a really good job in terms of promoting scientific research in STEM Education although supports for existing research project is still a lackluster. However, we believe the government can still focus more on the scientific research environment by introducing and giving out more financial aid for those small projects that are currently not funded.