Education and Public Engagement
To begin with, we’ve decided to make a difference among our schoolmates and teachers. Starting several seminars and lectures in our school campuses in Nanjing, Kunshan, Shanghai, we not only introduced our project but also unveiled the field of synthetic biology to students, most of whom were not familiar with this subject earlier.
Team members from NFLS held several seminars with students to discuss global warming, iGEM, and our project. During these seminars, our team members used statistics to analyze the ever-growing trend of global warming and illustrated our projects with understandable simplicity while not losing the gist. Alarmed yet hopeful to our projects, students raised deluges of questions from technical details of our project to the macroscopic influence and safety issues of our projects. While amazed by our contemporary students’ sincere concern on global warming and zealous enthusiasm towards synthetic biology, we addressed their questions properly and helped them understand deeper about synthetic biology. Also, we exchanged our ideas with our biology teachers who offered their genuine encouragement, helped us organizing these amazing events, and offered their intuitive advices to us.
At Kang Chiao International School, team member Keyu gave lectures to his schoolmates on topics including but not limited to global warming, iGEM, and synthetic biology. "It was an amazing experience to exchange ideas after lectures, to engage with these interesting minds that have intuitive ideas popping out in literally every aspect" said Keyu.
Boarder education
With voices of different people, we gained some insight into our education agenda, adjusting our focus on different topic when talking to different people. Consequently, our audience always enjoyed our topics and gave us positive feedbacks.
Our educational effort went beyond our campus into broader branch of students, we also gave lectures to interested students visiting our laboratory. Discussing with diversity of students, we gained intriguing ideas from students of different backgrounds. Their concerns about climate change and enthusiasm toward synthetic biology are what motivates us to go further. So in Zhejiang University, we gave short speeches to those visiting biology department on campus. These students not only include students from local community, but also comprise of students from all around the nation visiting this prestige university.
1.Survey
i.Education background
We can have a clear view of the education background of the respondents: more than half of the respondents have an undergraduate degree and nearly forty percent of respondents have received above high school education. Respondents who have received good education have a better understanding of the significance of what our team are trying to achieve, so the data we collected from them can be convincing and usable. Moreover, it is meaningful that we have successfully drawn attention of these people to our project.
ii.Perspective on increasing green-house gases
Initially, more than eighty-five percent of people think human beings should not only facilitate the energy-saving and emission-reduction, but also figure out new method to accelerate the recycling rate of the carbon dioxide in the air. None of them choose the option that humans don’t need to do anything when facing the environmental problems cause by the excessive emission of carbon dioxide. This, has obviously indicated that people now have a clear understanding of the current situation that the constantly increasing carbon dioxide in the air lead to serious influence on environment. Sequential problems cannot be predicted, but it is quite unanimous that we need to take action to prevent some detrimental influences from emerging and to render more people to realize the necessity of finding a new way of solving the problem.
iii.Perspective on public’s effort on practicing low-carbon lifestyle
The proportion of respondents who choose the option “the public are lack of awareness” and the proportion of respondents who choose the second option “the public are in a transition period to the low-carbon lifestyle” are close, which reflects a contradiction that deserves attention from our team. Respondents clearly have different ideas on this question. The statistics indicate the current situation in China is that there are still many people lack of awareness, but most people are those who aware the importance of protecting the environment and the necessity of leading a low-carbon lifestyle and seldom take action to pursue the green lifestyle. It is optimistic to think we are on our way to the low-carbon life style. There is still a long way to go.’
iv.Trip mode
Thanks to the convenient and cost-effective public transportation, more than half of the respondents choose to use them in daily routine. It is even more pleasing to notice that more than eighty percent of the respondents choose the way that we like to called low-carbon. Although the truth is the number of private cars are still increasing, we can suggest that people are willing to use public transportation and the awareness actually has positive influence on people’s behaviors and renders them to make reasonable choices.
v.Knowledge about Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)
Responses to this question demonstrate that respondents are not familiar with scientific carbon sequestration techniques. Conventionally, media emphasizes on reducing emission, blames factories and fossil-burning vehicles, and criticizes commercial lumbering, which is how people commonly learn about means to tackle global warming – namely, by reducing emission and planting more trees. However, methods involving active sequestration of CO2 were largely crippled in news coverage. It is this finding that gives us insight to a broader education on CCS in our schools and beyond.
vi.Perspective on CCS
After we informed respondents on the notion of CCS, we learnt that most of our respondent approve CCS technique, but with reserve. Some of them admit technical problems are non-neglected obstacles. Also, most CCS technique costs a lot and problems may emerge during disposal. Our respondents, in return, helped us realize problems underlying current methods and further incented us to pursue our cause.
2.Zhejiang Science and Technology Museum
On July 30th this summer vacation, we went to Zhejiang Science and Technology Museum to promote our project by presenting them to the visitors of the museum. We had prepared a presentation board and a video in order to introduce our project to the public with some background knowledge and information about our carbon fixer. To attract the visitors, we conducted some interesting experiments together with some children. What’s more, we had a n enjoyable and close collaboration with Worldshaper-XSHS, Worldshaper-Wuhan, and ASTWS-CHINA, including preparing the materials for experiments, performing experiments in front of public together, and communicate with each other about our projects. Not only did our team successfully promote our project that day, but we also attained some useful knowledge from Worldshaper-XSHS and got inspiration from them.
"I believe the important thing is not to show how good our project is, but to reveal the urgency of climate change and everyone's responsibility facing this challenge" said Yilong after the event.
And we did make some noise – our project and public engagement was covered in local news and magazines.
3.Effort on social media
With the help of the Internet, we were able to let our research heard.
On July 7th, our first article was born on Wechat official account "WorldshaperNJ". In this short passage, we explained who we are, made a brief illustration of our project, and expressed our concern about the environment and the future ahead of us. Since then, as our followers began to increase, we have updated much writing involving the progress of our project and explanation of many basic experimental skills. For instance, we demonstrated theories behind abstract words like plasmid extraction, carbon capture and storage and polymerase chain reaction. In addition, we also posted our questionnaire to acquire a better understanding of the public’s awareness of greenhouse gases along with other issues as indicated in ‘survey’ section. Some of the articles or videos portrayed our hard yet fulfilling lab life and our human practices in various places.
'Looking back at these passages, I can clearly recall the moment when I was sitting in front of the computer, scratching my hair only to think of a joke or pun to keep people interested in our articles. Revealing the secrets of science to the public is not a piece of cake, because science can be boring sometimes and nobody likes to spend his time reading through a tedious essay. That is why the job of human practice is important, for it allows people to stay in touch with science, which is changing at a rapid pace.' said Muchen Qi, the team member in charge of maintenance of our official account.
By writing these articles, we wish in heart that the readers can understand the work we are doing and the importance of it. We also want people to always possess a curious mind towards science and technology. Last but not least, we hope that the public can be more aware of the danger hidden in carbon dioxide and give a helping hand to mother Earth.
In addition, we also hold lab tours to those who were interested in biology and wanted to learn more about synthetic biology and iGEM. We were very lucky to find ourselves among these biology enthusiasts and introduced them different procedures and equipment as well as our project.
