As a major component for our community outreach, we value spreading awareness of synthetic biology knowledge to a larger crowd. We believe education is of high significance, and that inspiring students from a young age would be a great fit to our plan. We were lucky enough that our team captain has connections with a local school from his hometown, Yunlin County, located in the middle western part of Taiwan. From the initial planning to the work distribution, to the resource allocation, to the meticulous effort to call and contact with the school to affirm all details, to the attempts to counter crises, to the summation of class materials, we spent countless amounts of effort to perfect our rural education plan over the winter. Although synthetic biology is the gist of our entire winter camp, we also felt the need to engage with the kids in multiple other aspects as well. By this, we hoped to achieve a more well-roundedly constructed schedule and syllabus for the children. Aside from our main course, synbio lessons, we incorporate subjects such as English, Computer Science, Science Experiment, Art and Culture, Physical Education to increase the versatility and diversity of our program.

To promote the iGEM competition and synthetic biology knowledge to a larger extent, the human practice department hosted an online meeting to present a lecture on the introductory level of synthetic biology. We promoted our campaign on our social media to gain popularity, since we have had a dramatic increase of followers on social media this year, owing to all members’ promotion. The Vice Lead of our Wet Lab department, Andy Lin, gave an amazing lecture on said topic to our participants. Our target audience was high school students, and the majority of the participants fit our objective. Although we didn’t receive a response from all participants, several did stay in the meeting room after the presentation to ask further questions about the content.

In light of the promising result we obtained throughout the rural education in Yunlin, the hp department organized another collaboration with a local primary school in Taipei, Zhongshan Municipal Elementary School. In collaboration with the Wet Lab department, the Wego iGEM team produced a video introducing a simplified version of synbio knowledge. Interestingly, the connection we established with said elementary is with its Gifted Students Program, in which the instructors shape the students academic career closely in accordance to their interests and talents shown in certain fields. After the video showcase, we received warm regards from the instructor herself showing appreciation of our effort to assist students interested in biology. The HP department is certainly pleased that the effort to connect with our community paid off, and is definitely looking forward to seeing the future of those inspired by us!

Our public engagement program has two major aspects, education and public awareness spreading. For the public awareness sector, we further divided it into two sub-categories, preliminary survey and street interview. Our approach for preliminary survey, given its relatively simple purpose to seize a general idea of the public knowledge toward synbio and Type 1 diabetes, was to write down the questions with marker on a large piece of white board and ask the people on the streets to select the answers they see fit and put a sticker to the corresponding boxes. As seen in the photo, there are four questions, including “Do you know what Type 1 diabetes is?” “Do you know what insulin is?” “Do you know that teenagers and kids are the primary targets of T1D?” “Do you know what β cells are?” Our operation was successful, with a number of people willing to provide us with their insights and knowledge toward T1D, serving as samples for future references.