Difference between revisions of "Team:Nanjing-China/HP/Silver"

This year, our team Nanjing-China is mainly focused on developing new energy to deal with current energy crisis. Thus it is important for us to know both the public opinion about traditional chemical energy and development of new energy such as solar energy and hydrogen energy, as well as advice from experts about how to tailor our project to the current need. We also take the responsibility to propagate the idea of energy conservation and educate the young kids about synthetic biology. Therefore, we think we are qualified for the Human Practice silver medal.

We designed a questionnaire about general energy issues and our project both in English and Chinese versions. Finally, we have collected 573 samples, which qualified us to make further analysis about our topic.

1. Respondents

In order to get a comprehensive knowledge of people’s understanding about the background of our project, we collected a variety of respondents of different ages, different occupations and different knowledge levels. As to the age, respondents of 18-29 years old, such as university students, account for more than one-third of the total, so as the respondents of 30-49 years old, who are energetic to do their jobs or researches. The rest are people under 18 or above 50. Besides, as to the knowledge level, most respondents have received well-round education. And also, not so many, but also not none people with professional knowledge are involve according to the Job type results. That is to say, we almost covered ever stage of people and we are going to get a really comprehension results

2. The knowledge of new energy

Most people think that fossil fuels are running out and exploration of new energy has a big impact on future. However, people are overconfident about the time left. More than half the people think that energy crisis is 200 years away from now, which is not the case at all. This results dictates that propagation of basic knowledge about chemical energy and new energy such as solar energy is necessary. Solar energy is also the most well-known energy among the people surveyed.

Besides, we also investigated the attitudes of the public about the applicability of new energy. It turns out that cost and damage to the environment are the most important considerations of new energy development from the points of the public. We also found that community activity and propagation on the internet are the most acceptable ways for new energy propagation.

3. The knowledge of Bio-hydrogen

We are also curious about the public opinion of bio-hydrogen production. It turns out that the public don’t know well about the advantages of hydrogen as a new energy. Most people regard hydrogen as an unsafe form of energy and think it difficult for application to the industry, which is also the main problem that scientists want to solve.

For hydrogen production methods, water electrolysis is the most widely known. However, the public expect photo-biological water splitting as the most promising way, which is exactly what our project is focused on.

To get more specific opinions about our project, we also asked some detailed questions. To our surprise, most people have heard of microbes for energy production ad regard them as organisms with short life cycle and low energy consumption. Most of them can accept genetic modified organisms in hydrogen production, which makes it easier for propagation of our project.

4. The propagation of iGEM

In the last part of our questionnaire, we also designed some questions to propagate iGEM. The data shows that around 50% of respondents have heard of iGEM, and they mostly heard from educational or scientific research institutions. Besides, they treasure it as an opportunity to communicate other than competing as the meaning of this competition. It indicates that although iGEM is well-known to universities and scientific research institutes, it still lacks online propagation and social communities. Thus we made up plans to propagate iGEM through social activities in the community and propagations online.

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