As the fields of synthetic bioengineering and biotechnology continue to utilize the potentials of bacteria for diverse industrial applications, a concurrent surge in the significance of biosafety and its awareness has emerged. However, most people in our society are unaware and uninformed on the issue. To achieve sustainable development in the areas of biotechnology, our team chose to use the iGEM project as an opportunity to communicate biosafety and its importance to the general public. Ultimately, our team aims to use our educational resource as a bridge to connect the scientific community and the public.
Our team chose to prioritize the spread of biosafety awareness as a central theme for our education. Under the theme, we have deliberately devised and conducted 12 distinct educational activities, tailored to resonate with diverse age groups ranging from young children to the public and encompass individuals from different cultural and social backgrounds.
Figure 1
Education Expert interview
In order to educate others about synthetic biology, we need to be educated in the field ourselves. We naturally came to interview others from the area to learn more about our topic and gather advice about education for the public. The interviews that we conducted were able to inspire our educational methods and serve as the fundamental investigation for our education.
Dr. B, who had experience in iGEM, supported our move to educate the general public. He suggests that the public doesn’t have the correct knowledge regarding biosafety, specifically the functions of bacteria such as E. coli. This motivated us to do specific lectures and articles about bacteria and how they affect the environment and us. In addition, he recommends that we utilize diverse activities to target different audiences, so we choose to both engage online and offline platforms. This enables us to generate a widespread influence. Another expert that we interviewed was Dr. Wang. He also agrees that biosafety requires more public attention. He proposes that we could educate the public on matters that are closely related to their lives, which are now accomplished by our official account articles and YouTube videos.
Figure 2
Reflection:
As essential stakeholders of our project, we gained useful information from the interviewees, which was used to support our educational designs. However, issues such as not having enough information output from the interviewee and not being able to express ourselves clearly existed. Eventually, we solved the problems through preparatory discussions, continuous questioning, and full efforts spent on the interviews.
Education session at Shanghai Xuhui District Tianlin
Figure 3-7
On August 8th, the team E. cool-I visited the Shanghai Xuhui District Tianlin street to deliver a lecture about the world of microorganisms, targeted to children ranging from 7 to 10 years old. This lecture was meticulously planned, encompassing diverse range of subtopics that aimed to improve the understanding of bacteria for children. To guide our young participants more effectively, we designed our own A3 poster for the children to take notes and distributed the posters at the beginning of the lecture and prepared our own bacteria stickers and cute awards as a prize for the children. In the beginning of the lecture, our team first introduced bacteria by employing relatable and appropriate analogies. Our thoughtful approach aimed to create a bridge between unfamiliar scientific concepts and their daily lives, optimizing efficiency of the lecture. Building upon this foundation, our team navigated the children to the world of bacterial diversity. As the children start to understand the basic concepts, our team transitioned into a concise explanation of E. coli. By presenting many cases and examples, our team tried to show both negative connotations and positive applications to the children. After a brief introduction about E. coli, we explained the relationship between bacteria and pollution to raise awareness of biosafety. To complete the activity with fascination, we prepared a small drawing activity for children to draw their own form of bacteria. We motivated them to draw their own unique form of bacteria and asked them to explain the meanings behind their drawings. This activity not only gave us various perspectives but also gave us the opportunity to explore the creativity of children. Overall, the activity was successful in aspects of spreading awareness and planting curiosity to the young minds.
Figure 8
Reflection:
Although the workshop proceeded smoothly, our team encountered challenges in aspects of efficiency and engagement. Notably, for young audience, our team observed that information-heavy sessions were not as effective as we thought. To enhance effectiveness, we are planning to introduce more interactive activities in the second workshop. In addition, we also recognized the complexity of our workshop presented difficulties for our young audience. As a result, we are trying to adjust the complexity of information and aim to facilitate better understanding for the second workshop, connecting deeper with the audience.
Education session at Shanghai Kang Jian community
Figure 9-12
On September 11, our team visited the community center located in the Kang Jian street. With the prior knowledge we gained from our first workshop, our team modified the difficulty of the contents. Since we were told that the audience would be older than last time, we extended our contents to our own project to foster advanced environment for children to learn more effectively. During the lecture, our team incorporated more visual elements than the previous workshop to make our lecture more interactive and interesting. Compared to previous workshop, for instance, our team explained bacteria with different 3D models, emphasizing on the structure and the function of the corresponding structures. By employing these, the children exhibited a higher level of concentration and they were more willing to both answer and ask questions. When our team was explaining about the positive applications of bacteria, the children were surprised. After we noticed their space to improve, we focused on highlighting both the positive and negative applications of bacteria to meet our ultimate goal in education: constructing the bridge between the public and the scientific community. To end our workshop in meaningful way, we asked the children about some questions about bacterial applications that require critical thinking and multifaceted consideration. Our team used drawing as a medium to see their response toward the bacterial applications. The depictions of bacteria used in application were distinctively different from each others, as some considered as positive and some as negative. This workshop was valuable to us because our team took this workshop as lens to view the world of bioengineering and bacteria from the children's perspective.
Figure 13-16
Reflection:
Compared to the first workshop, we believe that our workshop improved substantially. However, we still confronted challenges in aspects of time management. Since our team wanted to incorporate more knowlede into our workshop, we confronted challenges in coveying our message in limited scope of time. As a result, our team was more motivated to be diligent in time allocation by breaking and assigning time limits to each branch of the workshop. Nevertheless, the workshop was a valuable opportunity for us to connect with the public that are responsible for future and we learned numerous priceless lessons from the workshop.
Education slides share
Figure 17&18
(Please click here to get the attachment)
Our Channels
In the past decade, social media saw a significant rise in importance; in the past three years, these software applications became an essential element of people's lives—specificially, they are now the center of which information is exchanged. Understanding this, we created multiple social media accounts to reach out to the general public, broaden our influence, and ultimately inform more about the importance of biosafety.
We have created a channel on Youtube for posting contents related to biosafety. This channel focuses on different region groups, broadening our outreach. Bilibili is a popular Chinese platform for videos, and our channel there emphasized viewers of Chinese heritage. On the other hand, our Youtube account created more international videos in English, for people around the globe to learn about our topic of biosafety.
Figure 19-21
On top of that, we have created a WeChat official account to focus on publishing textual content on elements related to biosafety, including genetically engineered bacteria and bacterial kill switches. The articles explore applications of those elements and highlight their significance in biosafety measures. As an immensely popular platform in China, WeChat aids us in spreading knowledge and educating the public. We see a total of over 400 reads for all of our articles.
Figure 22-24
With each publication on the platform, we hope to take a small step towards the public reaching a general awareness of biosafety. Only with greater understanding could come greater safety and a better future.
Reflection:
Our team experiences technical and production issues for both platforms. It was difficult for us to organize all the contents and decide on what and how to publish. Eventually, we managed to resolve the problems through tireless trials and planning. Currently, all of the publish materials play a part in spreading our influence and increasing public awareness on the topic.
Cartoon
The comic primarily intends to educate the general public on the dangers of lab leakages and our kill switch's role in containing them. In the comic, we personify our product as a hero, granted with the power to combat harmful bacteria. This creative approach aims to illustrate how our product can serve as a valuable ally and a bridge, actively contributing to the well-being of the public. By personifying our product in this manner, we seek to demonstrate its potential to make a positive and impactful difference in people's lives. The comic is released on various websites, including Xiaohongshu, Wechat official account, and Lofter. Since our comic is aimed towards a wide range of audience, the content is simplified and the art style is refined to appeal to the public's tastes. In addition, the comic is largely influenced by traitional Japanese 4-strip manga, taking after its light-hearted and simple style.
Reflection: The comic is successful in terms of visual arts; however, there are areas for improvement in its text and content design. The texts appear squiggly and slightly illegible for they are hand written. The content too seems somewhat immature and overly direct. But since the audience range is wide and diverse, the simplified plot may be a good choice for education.
Figure 25
Stickers
In our aim to bridge the gap between scientific world and the public, our group recognized the importance of unique and engaging designs to make our product more friendly to the public. Hence, our team created a set of bacteria emojis that our team planned to incorporate in our educational activties. By personifying the bacteria with distinct color and characterisitics, our team aimed to show the diversity of bacteria. Our team not only wanted to emphasize on bioengineering and its positive applications, but also wanted to break down the negative misunderstanding associated with bacteria. For instance, our emoji design featuring bacteria with smiling faces aimed to present a simple yet powerful message: bacteria aren't always harmful. In fact, we further wanted to show bacteria's positive attributes to our daily lives through the bacterial diversity. Our team belive that this creative strategy humanizes these microscopic organisms, making the topic more approachable and engaging for the public. Thus, we incoporated the stickers on our offline workshop, social media posts, and educational articles.
Reflection:
Overall, our team used these stickers to successfully finish numerous workshops and online educational activities. Since most of the public liked about the cute designs of bacteria, when we used this as a prize, the public was more engaged in our workshop. However, our team realized that oversimplification could be a problem. By focusing soley on the positive applications, the public might overlook the challenges and limitations in bioengineering technology. Thus, we realized how crucial for us to balance between clarity and complexity. Consequently, we tried our best to illustrate both sides of bioengineering with its limitation emphasized. In conclusion, the stickers were effective in concentrating public's attention, which helped us to reach closer to our ultimate aim.
Figure 26
(Please click here to get the attachment)
Brochure
We designed brochures to educate the public about biosafety and our solution: KillSwitch. In the brochure, we talked about biosafety, our mission, and our product design. We also left our WeChat, XiaoHongShu, and Bilibili account for further contacts.
To further publicize our team, we designed a brochure to give away at our offline activities that introduce us quickly to our audience. To do so, we first had to come up with a general vibe for our team, which will determine our brochure's aesthetic components. We ended up settling with a comfortable shade of grayish-beige, symbolizing our team's focus on the seemingly mundane (on the escape of bacteria, among all other big topics like medicine and healthcare). Beige is also the color commonly used as a backdrop, which relates to our project, being a safeguard for genetic engineering experiments and forming the "safety backdrop" of the more flashy projects.
We then summarized who we are and what we do for the brochure, bringing attention to both our project and the general biosafety issues that need addressing. We also left our WeChat, XiaoHongShu, and Bilibili account for further contacts. We decorated the brochure with the colorful self-designed stickers we made. Finally, we contacted print shops to print those brochures.
This brochure's final product was mainly a success. However, in retrospect, the brochure was unsuccessful because of how sparingly we used it. The brochure could have not only been distributed to people who came to our events, but to our peers as well. This would have made our project more public and recognized while educating more people on biosafety.
Figure 27&28
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Poster
The poster introduces the basics of biosafety in hopes of shedding light upon the issue of bio leakage which our product aims to resolve. The poster is used in offline educations targeting children, so we decided to simplify its design and minimize the text. Since our topic needs to be aligned with the public's perspective, The poster also serves as a generalized summary of parts of our project for the parents and officials attending the offline education.
Reflection:
Our team believe that the poster could’ve been more vibrant and saturated to make it more eye catching and appealing to children. Otherwise, it largely satisfies its purposes in informing people of bio safety. However, the poster was successful in aligning our education with the public's perspective.
Figure 29&30
(Please click here to get the attachment)
Videos - Podcast
Figure 31&32
Our team produced the podcast "Microbial Marvels" and posted it on YouTube. In doing so, we hope to spread knowledge on these microbials to the general public though casual discussions. This way, at the same time that the audiences are being entertained, they could learn something new. To form an appeal to the younger population of internet surfers, we alluded to movies and anime to make our content relatable. We started on the basics of biology required to understand bacteria, genetics, and modern achievements in the field. The videos are around 10 minutes of edited conversations. The ultimate message is that although biosafety seems to be far away from the public view, it has the potential to affect people's lives to a great degree, and thus, it is crucial to educate people on this topic
Reflection: The process of producing this type of media was a new experience for the team. We learned, adapted, and reflected upon the episodes, with an important lesson learned on audio and camera framing from the first video. Collaborating on everyone's ideas on how we could create these episodes was challanging but enjoyable. The technical problems and communication burdens the team resolved improved on our various skills and serves as a testiment to our connection and dedication.
Videos - Team Song
Figure 33&34
We hope to close the gap between the seemingly distant scientific community and the general public through using a lighthearted medium. Using the popular song "Wellerman (Sea Shanty)" as a reference, we created a parody version called the "E. cool-i Leak Shanty". One of our talented members designed the entire outline of the song. Then, our team collectively spent time making lyrics that are both meaningful and entertaining. After another teammate contributed her voice, one musically talented member pieced the song together, added his own flair, and edited a music video to go with it In our parody, we indicated the environmental and human threats caused by an E. coli leak, and we promoted our solution to the problem—the kill switch. Our group chose to use a song to convey our message because we believed that music has great power to resonate and convey messages. Through publishing the final product on YouTube, we hope to reach out to a wider public, to entertain them, and at the same time inform them on the issue.
Reflection: Although the process of completing this project was difficult, we are very satisfied with the final product. Our team faced difficulties in making concise and correct lyrics. Since there is a limit of time in the song, we devoted our time to designing rhymes and choosing the correct word choice. Overall, the process was very enjoying for all of our team member, and we believe that our ultimate message is well-presented in our song.
Articles
Through producing and publishing the articles, we aim to provide the general public with more in-depth information on bio-engineering and reach general awareness of biosafety. We plan to publish 9 articles revolving around three topics: biosafety, engineering bacterium, and kill switches. Nevertheless, the articles are produced to bridge the gap between the scientific community and the public. Our team regularly posted on WeChat, and our team members shared the posts to spread our articles. In order to reach out to a wider public, we created both English and Chinese versions. Since language can be a barrier in conveying our message to the public, we chose to break down the barrier by incorporating English and Chinese. According to the peers who can speak English, the English version contributed heavily in their understanding. With this feedback, our team focused on the bilingual presentation of the work.
Reflection:
As a reflection, the article production was really fast due to our team's productivity, but the team confronted challenges in publishing the article. Everyone in the team had their ideas about articles and motivations to complete the articles. Thus, the productivity was really high and stable. However, the process of establishing the account was strenuous. The process required multiple identification steps that took a long time for us to actually post our articles. At last, with our patience and effort, our account met the requirements, and we started to post our articles. In conclusion, our team learned how things cannot meet with expectations and how perseverance and patience are essential in real-life education.
Figure 35&36
Reflection:
We are glad to see a positive trend in statistics every time we post a new article, and delighted as some friends repost it of their will. We faced challenges as some of our members were native in English but bad at Chinese, making the translation hard and stiffy. Overall, our team members gained more experience writing and translating informative articles in the process.
Games
Games - E. Coli Eliminator
As an entertaining way of simply spreading awareness of bacterial growth and the possibly alarming consequences of lab-leaked bacteria, our modified version of the “Battleship” board game “E. Coli Eliminator” features a reskin of the original 1967 game where two players try to hit each other’s bacteria on a 10 by 10 board instead of naval ships. We made our own bacteria, specifically E. Coli, models that can fit onto the board of the original game. Since bacteria is not the focus of the game, the process of eliminating bacteria is, we wanted to provide information on how disinfections and sterilization works. So, we added abilities to the game in form of cards that players could use, such as “soap spray” and “alcohol additive.”
We brought the game to our classmates during September and October to spread the general awareness of how bacteria could be harmful and convey the importance of hygienic practices.
Figure New 1&2
Although the format of our game is enjoyable, as the core gameplay is still the timeless design of “Battleship”, the yields of playing the game could be improved. We could change up the design of the game some way to ensure that players need a basic understanding of bacteria, or even just unicellular organisms, to succeed in the game. This could incentivize learning biology as people play and improve in playing our “E. Coli Eliminator.”
Games - 2048
Our team developed an E. coli version of 2048 in aims of reaching a broader range of audiences and expanding our influence. 2048 is a widely known game among people our age, especially those of teenager. Thus, our programmers worked to incorporate their interests into iGEM by coding for this E.coli 2048. The bacteria images in the game are also created by our team. Moreover, they created multiple versions of the game to perfect their codes. The first version faced many issues, including graphic quality and loading speed. However, the final version has overcome these challenges and constructed a complete, functional 2048. In addition, our team asked other students from different schools to play this game and give us honest feedback on improvement. With their feedback, our team added the background for each
Figure 37&38
(Please click here to access the game)
https://e-cool-i.github.io/2048-Bacterial-Fusion/
Reflection:
The team members did not learn about JavaScript before, which is the language of the source code that our team incorporated. Nevertheless, our team members spent their extra time and effort learning JavaScript to make a better educational and entertaining tool.
Games - Merge Bacertiomelon Challenge
Figure 39-41
(Please click here to access the game)
https://e-cool-i.github.io/Bacterial-Fusion/
Our team has created an eye-catching game called "Merge Bacteriomelon Challenge" as a means to raise awareness about biosafety and our Killswitch project. Our team gained inspiration from the popular game "Merge Watermelon" as a benchmark for our own game. Our goal was to effectively use the familiarity of the gameplay mechanisms and design elements from the popular game to make it more accessible and familiar to the public. By doing so, our team aimed to create a game that would resonate with players and provide a sense of familiarity while also delivering essential messages about biosafety and our Killswitch project. This approach allows us to bridge the gap between a familiar gaming experience and our educational objectives, making it conducive for the public to engage with and understand the important concepts we wish to convey. Within the game, you'll find a character, E. Coli, decorated with a scarf located in the upper right corner. Clicking on this character will redirect players to our team's website, where they can gain a deeper understanding and insights into our project. Our team chose to develop this game because it has the unique ability to appeal to a wide range of age groups, making it an effective tool for educating the public about biosafety. By combining digital entertainment with education, "Merge Bacteriomelon Challenge" enables us to convey important biosafety concepts in an engaging and memorable way.
Reflection: Similar to the 2048, the javascript is used in the main source. Consequently, our team had to learn the javascript to customize the game. Moreover, our team also confronted difficulties in making a stable server. Thus, our team found a way to improve stability by linking the game to other website. Overall, the process of making game was enjoyable ans seeing people playing our game motivated us to work harder.
Our team, E. cool-i, designed and developed a plasmid kill switch test kit based on temperature to control the growth of engineering bacteria and limit environmental pollution. While the wet weam focused on developing a suitable and sustainable product, the dry team concentrated its effort on how are we going to present our motivations and goals in an eloquent and pervasive manner. Consequently, our team has conducted numerous interviews with the experts in the field of engineering to gain insights about how public will accept and understand our product. Since our ultimate goal of education is to construct a bridge to connect between the scientific community and the public, our team exceptionally focused on creating diverse educational activities that can both be suitable and conducive to comprehend for the public. For instance, our team has successfully finished two offline workshops for the children, who are also the future generation that will have to be familiar with bioengineered products. The team not only prepared a lecture to explore the diverse applications of bacteria, but also designed various interactive activities that can make the children more engaged during the lecture. In order to connect deeper with the public of an older generation, we prepared brochure, poster, and online articles about our objectives. Each of the articles contain detailed information about biosafety and bioengineering, rasinig the awareness of biosafety. Moreover, our team has created two online games that are eye-catching and entertaining to play. To reach out to all kinds of public, we created simple but effective and interesting games to call more attention on our objectives. Furthermore, we effectively used online platforms as our tool to engage with the people from world-wide. Our youtube channel has two podcast videos that provide insightful conversations about how people have accepted bioengineering, In the format of podcast, we aimed to connect with public in more of a comfortable and casual manner. On the other hand, our talented members created a song to inform the public about the importance of biosafety in a lighthearted way. In conclusion, despite the numerous challenges our team encountered while developing educational activities focused on biosafety, we collectively persevered and overcame these obstacles under the strong basis of responsibility. Our shared commitment to emphasizing the significance of biosafety allowed us to successfully construct a meaningful and invaluable bridge that connects the scientific community with the broader public.