Introduction and Overview
Communication is an important element for a project to improve and develop towards the need of society. Through collecting advice from other IGEM teams we could receive the more rounded suggestions to our experimental design, dry lab activities, future industrial development and business development.
Communication should be a two-way process where we give and receive ideas. Through a number of sharing sessions and colaborative discussions, we are able to learn, introspect, summarize, plan, and take actions.
Our team had attended three sharing sessions between IGEM teams from different age groups.
- South China Regional Meeting
An one-day activity including “Villages-carnival” (where the teams are categorized in the form of treatment, testing, agriculture, and manufacturing, and participants can travel between the villages to have deep discussion about their projects.) , Guest Speech (members of CCIC and HP Committee gave speech on human practice and other tips related to the competition), and sharing session (teams give a speech to introduce their project and receive questions and/or advice from members from other teams.)
- 2.Conference of China IGMer Community (CCIC)
An online&offline Conderence of IGEM teams across the country. Our team attended the conference online, introducing our project and getting advice from the others, in the meantime learning form their projects as well.
- 3.High School Meetup
An activity held by high school teams to share and discuss the projects.
Method
Our team has set a standard procedure for every communication activity. Since that the goal of communication is to learn and improve, we believe that it is essential for us to summarize and analyze what we have learnt every time. We need to see the as many possibilities from the advice as we can.
We have compressed and optimized the Gibbs'Reflective Cycle (Description-Feeling-Evaluation-Analysis-Conclusion-Action plan) according to our needs in each communication activity goal and our project.
Below is the method that we follow for every communication activity:
Learn:
- Learning experience and innovative ideas from other team’s project.
- Learning the advice from other teams based on our project.
- Reflecting on what the strength and weaknesses of our past
- Reflecting on what could have been done.
- Reflecting on what can be done in the future.
- Summarize what we have learnt.
- Summarize what we will do.
- Plan on what we are doing in the future base on the summarization.
- Make what was planned come true.
The cross-pollination of ideas can enhance the quality, resilience, and success of the project. Our team follows this method strictly to ensure that we make full use of every learning opportunity.
The Activities
South China Regional Meeting
May 21st
Abstract
Fig.1.2 Left:Irene, team member; Centre: Yolanda, Student Leader; Right: Jiawen Chen, Instructor. They are discussing about the best way to introduce our project.
Conclusion:
- Learn: We have learnt about IHP, competition tips, other team’s project activities as reference, advice from other teams.
- Introspect: We had found a better way to produce ambrein and santalol of good quality with lower price than natural extraction and chemical synthesis, however, we were on a direction (aroma therapy) that is probably not suitable for our project.
- Summarize: We should have a throughout planning of our human practice. We could do more research on lowering price of our product.
- Actions: Till now we have used various methods to investigate the pricing of our product through market investigation and modeling. We will continue to do more precise prediction and further plannning to achieve the goal of producing ambrein and santalol with high quality using the least amount of money.
Conference of China IGEMer Community (CCIC)
July 8th – 10th
We attended the conference online. We prepared both the recorded presentation of the introduction and the real-time introduction. We introduced our project and talked about the activities that we had held or attended. Unfortunately there was not questions asked or advice received after the presentation. Nonetheless, we are still able to learn from this experience.
- Learn: We believed that the reason why we did not received any question or advice was probably because we are online, and without the eye contact and body language it is more difficult to engage the listeners and let they become curious about our project than introducing it offline. Despite that we didn’t received any advice, We found a team (Tianjin) in the conference that knows a professor that has once published a paper about synthesis of ambrein which we take as a reference in our experimental design.
- Introspect: We should choose the form of communication carefully, and think in the listener’s position. This could not only help us with the communication activities but also the presentation in the judging session.
- Summarize: Next time when we do a communicating session or other activities, we will try to find the better way to keep the listeners interested. For example, for children we could add some games or DIY activities when introducing them to genetic engineering and our project; for elder people we could link the content of the technology to their daily life, like comparing the genetically engineered lettuce with the normal lettuce; for other igem teams, we could emphasize on the specialities of the project, and list out clearly what we have done and what we need, asking for advice, help, or even corporation directly instead of waiting for people to ask.
- Actions: We make use of this experience on both our communication activities in the High School Meetup and the IHP activities. For each activity we modified the form and the details of them, to make it more suitable for the aimed audience. (For specific information check “high school meetup” and “integrated human practice”) We had also tried to contacted professors that have published paper related to the production of ambrein or santalol to ask if we could have the chance to have the chance to learn from them. However, we didn’t received any reply from the professors. We then contacted a company of essential oils (which includes sandalwood oils), and got the opportunity to have a tour. We learnt about the specific tests and certificates we have to get before launching our products on the market.
High School Meetup
August 7th
A member from GreatBay-SCIE asked a question about how are we going to link the dry lab to the wet lab, which reminded us that for the human practice and other activities that we had done, none of the activities are practically helping the experiment design or process, which is why we started to do modeling related to the transcription factor and other things we are or will be using in our experiment to enhance our experimental design. Additionally, an instructor gave us an advice about predicting the price of product by visiting a fermatation factory and learn how their factory works. Both of the advice had had a great influence on our project.
Conclusion:
- Learn: We are reminded of linking dry lab with wet lab, and also a way to perfect our prediction of the price of our product,
- Introspect: We should always link the activities that we had done to our experiment, both sides can enhance each other as long as we make good use of them.
- Summarize: We should do more activities related to the lab. We could try and contact some fermentation factory to see if we can have a tour and learn from them.
- Actions: Till now we have used modeling to find better ways to enhance our experimental design. As for visiting the factory…unfortunately we were unable to contact a factory that allows students to have a tour. However, we have tried other ways to perfect the prediction of price by asking advice from professionals, self-research and calculation. In the future, we will possibly try to contact some factories again and see if we would have the chance to learn from the professionals.