Team:ZJU-China/HP/Gold
GOLD
Since the process of encryption and decryption can derive a series of interactive activities, the idea of biological cipher machine itself can be a good carrier of synthetic biology. How does our Enigma machine inspire the public? And what will these voices outside the lab inspire us to reflect on our project?
Continue to find the answer!
Attribution of Team members
Management
Experiment & collaboration: Lejian Jiang
Overview
We believe that a project will not be excellent enough without creative design, diligent lab work, and serious human practice work. Design of the biological machine determines the upper limit of the project, and lab work determines the lower limit of the project. As for human practice work, it views iGEM and synthetic biology in a broader perspective, which is close to the exploration of social value and describes a bigger world that synthetic biology and iGEM exist.
In order to describe this “bigger world” better, ZJU-China has been tried hard to collect the voices outside the lab and integrate the investigated issue into the design and the execution of our project.
As previously mentioned, we explored the topic of public engagement/dialogue. We intended to call for the public’s attention through our attractive project and use their feedback to improve it and the way we tell the story of synthetic biology. What’s more, we reflected our own conception of what synthetic biology can bring us.
Elementary activities
We went to STEM science festival and science & technology museum in summer. And set up a stall in the exhibition hall. We used room escape game, decoding game using cadies as props, and a video telling a story based on synthetic biology to attract their attention and introduced synthetic biology to the public.
What’ the feedbacks?
What do we think and do?
These feedbacks are the epitome of wonder and concern about synthetic biology. The old rejected things that may change their life instinctively, and were very serious about biosafety. The teacher welcomed the new idea of synthetic biology, and want to help the students to expand their horizon. The high school student were curious about what synthetic biology can do, and want to know more about the details. And the kids’ curiosity for synthetic biology was sparked(though they may not know the whole meaning).
We carefully explained the safety problem synthetic biology concerned to the old, and realized it is the first problem that synthetic biology should settled down, in order to apply it to reality. However, some problems of biosafety are easy to settle, while others are hard to make it clear. But what we can do is to improve the safety of our biological machine. And we decided to use less proper nouns while talking to the old and emphasis on the success that synthetic biology have achieved, in order to make them feel freer and easier to accept the idea. And we are very pleased to know that the idea of synthetic biology is valued by most of the public from the dialogue.
What’s more, we found that our methods of attracting attention were useful, but it seemed that we need some other methods to help us to explain the project and synthetic biology. So we designed a software version and a mechanical version (using circuit board) of the biological cipher machine and use it to introduce our project to the public. And a series of postcards with codes that could be deciphered with the software came out, too.
In addition to what we have done to meet the requirements of the silver medal, we attended a national famous skill sharing activity in China, Oneyouth Talk.
We presented our work and introduced synthetic biology to the public. And after the presentation was over, many people talked to us, and gave some valuable feedbacks. There was also a fair in the location of the Talk for people to sell some interesting made by themselves. We sold our postcards with codes there, using the software to help them to decode the information, which helped a lot to explain our project.
What’ the feedbacks?
What do we think and do?
We are inspired by those sincere feedback, and try to improve our project and the way we introduce it. For an example, we consider feedback 1, and improved our hardware to make it capable of protecting the bacteria inside. we consider feedback 4, and add answer this question in our future plan(链接到design). We design what change we need to do in order to deal with more information.
