Based on our idea “Science for all & Science is fun”, we vigorously engaged ourselves into education and science advocating activities. All events have served for our final goal in long run: creating a science culture for all generations in our community in the future. Hopefully, we’ve tickled all the boxes that “Best Education and Public Engagement” requires. As our activity’s scale and dimension is concerned, we are confident to say that we did well beyond the prize requirement in such interaction-oriented education and public engagement.

    We held a fantastic workshop, whose theme was “deciphering life”, in the dinosaur square of China Science and Technology Museum (CSTM) for three days during our national days. The workshop attracted thousands of audience, including children and their parents, who showed great interest in biology. iGEM as well as synthetic biology was also introduced in our exhibition. The workshop consisted of five sections, display board exhibition, DNA model building, E.coli DIY workshop, E.coli war and bacteria art exhibition. What’s more, we eventually formed long-standing cooperative relationship with CSTM, which will be a public educational base for later Tsinghua-A teams’ human practice.

     This section was meant for adults and teenagers. We made 12 display boards in total, which articulate and connect fundamental ideas in genetics, synthetic biology and iGEM without technical vocabulary and dense detail. Parents whose children was engaged with our other activities can come and listen; we got great feedback from them. They asked many questions and learned a lot in this section.

     In this section, we taught the children to build a paper DNA double-helix model, provided by China Science and Technology Museum. Before starting to make the model, we introduced the knowledge of DNA to let them make sense of what DNA is and what function it has. Children participated in the activity in great passion and enjoyed the process. Everyone involved took home a wonderful model and our exquisite souvenirs.

     The purpose of this section was to develop ideas of synthetic biology in children’s mind using their imagination. We introduced how the scientist manipulate the gene in microbe to help them solve problems. Then we let the children design bacteria with a possible application using color pens in their hands. In the workshop, we were surprised by children’s creative though from time to time. Some of their fascinating ideas are listed below:
    “My bacteria can produce enormous ozone so that it can repair the damaged ozone layer for us.”
    “My bacteria can absorb PM2.5 and refresh our air without sunlight!”
    “I want to creat a group of bacterium that can sing song for me when I go to sleep!”
——“I will design a kind of bacteria that can make me sick if I wanted it to…”
——“Why? Because I can stay at home when my friends go to school and have exams.”

     As we mentioned in our project, we created a game based on liquid and solid culture medium. In this section, we presented our games on iPad. The games attracted a large amount of both children and adult players, who not only enjoyed the game, but also learned the way bacteria talks.

     Except the interactive sections mentioned above, we also set a section just for exhibiting. We drew some beautiful painting using bacteria with florescence on the solid culture medium in the lab, and presented them in our exhibition. In addition, we introduced the principle of these paintings to the audience.

     To make a greater influence on our younger community member, we further revised our two web games by visiting one of China’s biggest internet entertainment giant “Perfect World” where we got plenty of useful advice on our games and work.

    During the visit, we had a deep communication with the company’s staffs. First the company’s HR gave a brief introduction of the company. Then we talked to a senior game designer. He gave us some advice on how to make a game more playable. Next, we visited the art design group; they taught us how to design beautiful game characters in a limited time.
    In the end, we provided our first version of games to the company’s employees and proposed issue about games’ balance between playability and authenticity. If we focus too much on authenticity, the playability of the game decrease. And in the same way, if we focus too much on the playability, the games will lose their authenticity and scientific meaning.
    After listening their advice, we divided our game into two parts, In the first part, player can initial their characters. We designed three characters, farmer, warrior and bagger. In order to reflect player’s strategy, we limited the initial number which player only can initial 10 characters. After initialing characters the game begins and the game will calculate the total number of each character. In the end, the player who have more bacteria will win. These improvements will help us web game become more playable meanwhile retaining the scientific truth.

    We held a synthetic biology seminar on September 21st , 2017, which attracted a number of undergraduates from different majors in Tsinghua. During this cross-discipline seminar, we delivered lectures on cutting-edge scientific discovery related to synthetic biology and introduced our project. We enlightened audience about biological design by organizing hypothetical iGEM brainstorms and eventually, student representatives from audience shared their thoughts with the crowds, whose ideas impressed us with their imaginative designs. They then received souvenirs for their courage and good exhibition.

     After we further explored the game we created by ourselves, we find something more than just having fun. In fact, our game E.coli War has many deep meanings for us to explore. We have found it really interesting when we compare our game theories with typical history events, which expands our games’ meaning to a historical and strategic range. Our smart team member Li Siting did such innovative work, which makes it possible for us to draw a wider range of attention from division of social science and history research in the future. It is a brand new way for science advocating that strengthens the story-telling ability of science thus makes the public more interested in science. Then, it is very likely that we have made a huge step forward in the efforts to create science culture in our community. Click here for more details.