Team:USTC-Software/human practice

Team

Human Practice

Unit Test

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. What’s more, the game Foldit is used to give children a vivid model of protein. 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 Chiao Tung University from July 31st to August 4th 2017. 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.

Science and Technology Exhibition

We held a Synthetic Biology exhibition in Hefei science museum, which is the largest off-campus science class. This exhibition attracts thousands of citizens including innocent pupils, high school students and their parents. And our team coordinated with team USTC and provide a flood of synthetic knowledge to the visitors.

We used metaphors of LEGO and principle of programming to introduce the concept of biobricks and Synthetic Biology. In addition, we invited teenagers to play Foldit (an online puzzle video game about protein folding) to give them a sense of computer-aided design. We also prepared several games so that they could learn knowledge while having fun.

Software Promotion

Since our software is an open and fantastic platform with practical functions for synthetic biologists, it’s of great importance to promote our software to synthetic biology related users.

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 and in October we packed a more advanced version to some igem teams worldwide. 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. And then we have packed our completed version to the real synthetic biologists by now.