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• Engagement

  • Introductory Courses

  • Motivation Investigation

  • Collaboration

  • Recruitment Campaign

  • Destop Pet System

  • Website and Posters

Public Engagement & Collaboration

As a student of the top normal university of China, we felt obligated to contribute to the popularization and education of the advanced idea of synthetic biology and iGEM. Thus, we took advantage of the education-related resources we possessed, and did a lot of meaningful and experimental educational works. We designed a systematic four-week introductory courses with the help of professors who owned original comprehension on the methodology of teaching. We launched this course system in a series of schools, expecting to stimulate their interests in synthetic biology. As for the selecting and breeding process for the next generation of team BNU-China, we’ve developed a whole new and well-paced program with a step-by-step handbook. We shared the handbook with future iGEMers from Chongqing University and helped them to prepare for 2018 iGEM competition. What’s more, We created an animated figure as a desktop assistant system based on our projects and basic knowledge and information on synthetic biology and iGEM. Lastly, we reviewed the history and experiences of our team, and we set up our own websites and printed posters to exhibit our achievements.

Introductory Courses

In September 2017, with the hope to accumulate experiences and explore the methodology of synthetic biology propagation, we launched the systematic four-week introductory course program at Bayi High School as a meaningful attempt on in-depth teaching of the principles of synthetic biology towards average high school students. The course system covers the 101 introduction on synthetic biology together with some example of its application adapted according to the knowledge base of high school students and a brief lecture on iGEM and our project. To guarantee the quality of the courses, we practiced, rehearsed and revised for several rounds. To make sure that the involved school, students and their parents fully consented with the course series and were willing to participate actively, we handed out well-adapted formal consent forms, which we believe to be a fair template for future references. The courses were liked by most of the students, and there were heated discussion among the teachers and students.

Experimental introductory synthetic biology courses

Through this short-term course series, we’ve discovered some patterns on the way these high school kids interact with introductory synthetic biology courses. Generally, due to lack of background knowledge, at first, they appeared indifferent about the theoretical knowledge, such as the assembly of the gene pathways. On the contrary, stories.

Motivation Investigation

As we’ve all acknowledged, successes and breakthroughs in iGEM are tightly linked with the ability of the participants to self-motivate to learn and improve themselves. So we employed the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) to assess iGEMers’s motivational orientations and their learning strategies within the Chinese iGEM community. In total, we’ve collected 53 questionnaire results in Chinese community.

The MSLQ is based on a general cognitive view of motivation and learning strategies. There are essentially two sections to the MSLQ, a motivation section, and a learning strategies section. The motivation section consists of 31 items that assess students' goals and value beliefs for a project, their beliefs about their skill to succeed in a project, and their anxiety about tests in a project. The learning strategy section includes 31 items regarding students' use of different cognitive and metacognitive strategies. In addition, the learning strategies section includes 19 items concerning student management of different resources.

Through our adapted questionnaire, 11 scales of feedbacks on students’ motivation towards iGEM could be presented, which are Intrinsic Goal Orientation, Extrinsic Goal Orientation, Critical Thinking, Rehearsal, Elaboration, Organization, Metacognitive Self-Regulation, Time and Study Environment, Effort Regulation, Peer Learning, and Help Seeking.

Here’re our major results: In order to set up valid control groups, we dissected the respondents by their gender and role in the team. Specifically, we did two comparisons. One is between male and female respondents, the other one is between team leaders and the rest members of a team. To analyze the data, we conducted significance test for two comparisons respectively to see what happens. As a result, we did get some amazing results.

1. Leaders do distinctly better in Critical Thinking, Elaboration and Peer Learning.

Comparison between leaders and non-leaders

In the comparison between team leaders and the rest of the team, leaders scored higher in almost all scales. And the test results showed that there were significant differences in Critical Thinking, Elaboration and Peer Learning. Based on the result, we interpreted what these three scales mentioned above contributed to being a successful iGEM leader.

Firstly, we cleared the definition of these tree scales according to the MSLQ manual(Paul R.,1991).

"Critical thinking refers to the degree to which students report applying previous knowledge to new situations in order to solve problems, reach decisions, or make critical evaluations with respect to standards of excellence.

Elaboration reflects how often students attempt to summarize or paraphrase (put into your own words) the material they read in their textbooks, and how often they try to relate the material to what they already know or have learned.

Collaborating with one's peers has been found to have positive effects on achievement. Dialogue with peers can help a leader clarify course material and reach insights one may not have attained on one's own, which will significantly enhance the efficiency."

Then, to better interpret our findings, we did more interviews online with iGEMers participated in our survey. We find out some reasons for the differences in the above scales. These abilities are required for leaders from the very beginning of the project. Whereas to some extent, other team members may be left out from the designing process and/or problem shooting process, and only do experiments and tasks assigned to them. This would greatly deprive their opportunities to practice these skills.

After reaching this results, we believed that we should adapt our training process for our next team to help future team members to develop a sense of active participation right from the beginning. For example, we set up performance assessment system emphasizing on participation degree, and we required detailed document on attribution. This should push the team members to better involve themselves throughout the project.

2. Girls appear to be weaker in critical thinking.

Comparison between female and male respondents

From the gender comparison, we found that girls’ critical thinking ability is distinctly poorer. Previous researches have shown that there’s significant gender difference in thinking structure. Girls does better in memorizing and initiating, but worse in logical thinking, abstract thinking and innovation, which are fundamental elements of critical thinking. Sadly, sociological studies have shown that our society still holds the view that girls are born to be more unsuitable than boys to study science, which brings down their self-assessment unconsciously. Even worse, the existing education system can’t spur girls’ enthusiasm for science and cultivate their critical thinking efficiently, which has made things even worse.

Based on the above survey results combined with our analysis and discussion, We believe that Chinese girls need more opportunities and platforms to improve the ability of independent critical thinking. And iGEM, as a competition encouraging innovation and creativity, should undoubtedly provide such a platform for girls. As a team consisting of many girls, we ought to do something to help change the situation. However, we spent a lot of time on designing, handing out and analyzing the questionnaires, which left us little time to react upon these findings. Therefore, we plan on starting a GILR-UP Campaign after the Giant Jamboree. We also suggest that iGEM perhaps could add some more elements that can help develop girl power in the future.

Collaboration on lab safety

In the Chinese academic society, safety education is an essential but usually neglected component of the lab training, which, unfortunately, has led to numerous tragic accidents. To our astonishment, only limited material on this matter can be easily accessed within the Chinese academic and educational atmosphere. Therefore, we planned a Chinese voice-over lab safety educational video shooting event together with Shanghai Technology University, Wuhan University, and some other Chinese universities. We were inspired greatly by the Yale Biosafety Manual, and divided the tasks into several parts and assigned them to each school. Our part was to shoot an introductory video on the safe operation on several commonly used equipment.

Video on lab safety

For more videos in this collaborative project, please click here.

Recruitment Campaign

Since the very beginning of team iGEM BNU-China, we’ve been optimising the process of team member selecting and training to better prepare our iGEMers. To generalize our past experiences and standardize the recruitment and training for our new iGEMers, we have compiled a handbook in Chinese. The handbook contains all essential contents of building up an iGEM team and specific procedures throughout the whole competition. With this handbook, every new iGEMer will have good command of what needs to be done in iGEM and how to accomplish them. It will significantly enhance the efficiency of the recruitment and training. Furthermore, we have sent this handbook to the future iGEMers in Chongqing University to help them establish their first iGEM team from scratch. Hopefully, they will join in the iGEM community next year.

On Sep. 24th, we held a recruitment campus event. We invited our coach, Prof. Zhu Xudong, to give us a keynote speech on the general idea of synthetic biology and iGEM. Later on, our core member presented some detailed information on the exciting iGEM experience and the composition of an iGEM team.

At recruitment campus event

After signing-up closed, we began our training session, which is carried out in a mentor-student system. Specifically, each core member of BNU-China 2017 is assigned 3-4 students matched according to the mentors’ specialty and the students’ interests. Students learn the required materials and supplementary ones listed on the syllabus. Mentors monitor the study pace of each student, answer their questions in the weekly meeting. Up to now, those, who had received trainings both by lectures and by our new mentor system, commented that they had gotten much more and much faster in this interactive system. In January and February, we plan on inviting several learned researchers and professors to give new iGEMers inspiring keynote speeches. Meanwhile, the training of lab techniques will start as well.

Destop Pet System

This year our theme is based on a Chines literature classic story named Pilgrimage to the West, in which the Monkey King is one of the main characters. To offer a more interactive experience, we created a desktop assistant system with the cute animated figure of the Monkey King. This system can react to simple instructions in natural languages and send back with related information on synthetic biology, iGEM, and our team. Besides, the animated Monkey King will send out warm greetings and farewells to the users upon opening and closing.

Sample dialogs with the desktop assistant system

Website and Posters

This is the fourth year since our university has joined in the iGEM community, whereas majority of our fellow students know little about this fantastic opportunity for fast personal growth. For the purpose of elevating the influence level of iGEM, we set up a website to exhibit the achievements of our past projects, to propagate the idea of synthetic biology and iGEM, and more importantly, to create a platform to document and share protocols, training videos and first-hand experiences for future reference.

BNU-China Official Website

Meanwhile, we printed out posters and put them up along the aisle outside out lab, where freshmen walk through for their experiment course. As a results, the sign-up number for the recruitment of the next team showed a significant increase

Design drafts of 14 posters(Click on the pictures to view a higher-resolution version)