Human practice is one of iGEM’s most important features that makes the competition very different from the other. This year, Team Tsinghua-A organized a series of activities based on their own understanding of what human practice is. All the activities share some common characteristics.
    Interaction oriented——Team members engage all stakeholders by idea exchange.
    The thought of “all”——We want to create science culture for the whole society to help community members to stay creative and productive. Therefore, our activities include people from all generations.
    Balance between “rigorous” and “interesting”—— the nature of science is rigorous, while we can make it as interesting as possible to make science accessible for ordinary people. How to balance between those two aspects can be a meaningful question to explore.
    Tsinghua-A has been thinking about what their projects can bring to the world before they picked up the first pipette in lab. As one of our initial goal stands, we would like to make science a resource beyond universities and institutes and create science culture for our community. To reach this goal, we put forward our interesting project to the public and are curious to see what effect can be sparked out of the interaction. What can science bring to the public and what science gets in return is an interesting topic that we would like to explore.

    First we made a trial within university. We let the project step out from our discipline. We held a cross-discipline seminar delivering lectures on cutting-edge scientific discovery related to synthetic biology and introduced our project, through which we harvest massive creative ideas and comments. Click to see in detail.

    Then we made our way to the public. Before it, under the guidance of biotechnological company’s planning staff, we got fully prepared by making related resources including exhibition boards, leaflets, souvenir stickers and postcards ready. What’s more, to make the activity more interactive and engaging, we took fully advantage of our visualization tool, the two games derived from project idea and modeling results. We optimized their function under the guidance of professional game designers from ‘Perfect World’. Click to see in detail.

    Finally, we made a hit at China Science and Technology Museum by holding a workshop named “Deciphering Life” that targets both adults and children. We propagated synthetic biology to adults by displaying exhibition and delivering explanation. For children, we had playful workshop activities including engaging art design, DNA model building and web game section with the hope to inspire their affection towards science and research. We got precious feedback from different groups. Staffs from the museum reminded us about the rigorous nature of science and we should balance between rigorousness and joyfulness when we choose the methodology in our activity. We were also inspired by children for more possibility in considering the influence of spatial factors on population interactions that may be helpful for our future work. Click to see in detail.

    On campus, we also discussed our project with professors in the field of microbial biology. We finally confirmed three characters (farmer, warrior and beggar) for our project together. We especially want to express our appreciation for Professor Xie and Wang who provided us lots of advice in introducing and completing the character beggar whose prototype in nature is “cheater”.