Team:Tokyo-NoKoGen/Practices
We took the questionnaire not only in Japanese but also in English through SNS such as Facebook and twitter.
We also worked in collaboration with iGEM UI Indonesia and we spread the own questionnaires throughout each country. Therefore, we could get answers from all over the world, especially Japan and Indonesia.
The each question and results of the questionnaire are shown below.
Q1. Have you ever heard of iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine)?
Q2. What kind of images do you have of E.coli?
On the other hand, in Indonesia, most popular answer is “E.coli is interesting”. The percentages of feeling interesting(21 %) is twice as that of Japan(11 %)!
But many people think E.coli bad thing like “main cause of infection” or “dirty” both in Japan and Indonesia! So negative images of E.coli are worldwide.
Q3. How do you want to use E.coli in your lifestyle?
On the other hand, in Indonesia, extermination of harmful insects and detection of environment pollutants.
From these results, Japanese think that E.coli can work as a useful device, but Indonesian thinks that it can work as a device for protecting environment and their daily life. The reason why people in Indonesia want E.coli to protect their lives is that there are many harmful insects in Indonesia than Japan. So we should achieve to make the device for protecting their comfortable lives.
So we can say that devices for developed countries are not needed for worldwide. We should consider about their environments, areas and so on…
Q4. What image of synthetic biology do you have?
Many of Japanese people are interested in synthetic biology but some people think that synthetic biology is difficult.
Talking about Indonesia, most common answer is “difficult”, but as many as people think “fun”! Both countries, their main 2 answers are completely opposite.
These results show that if there are some opportunities to know about synthetic biology, people who think difficult will change their images from difficult to fun or interesting!
Q5. How do you think about iGEM after the questionnaire?
Both in Japan and Indonesia, people more generally considered each team join to iGEM are “fighting”, “interesting” and “they curious about projects” after answering the questionnaire. But in Indonesia, 22% think that iGEM is difficult. Probably Japanese have great deal of curiosities than Indonesian.
Q6. At last, how did your images for E.coli change?
Compared with Q2, the number of Japanese people who consider E.coli available got increase from 20% to 25%. And also the number of Japanese people who got interested in E.coli became increase. Our questionnaire gave Japanese who answer the questionnaire good images for E.coli. And in Japan, through the questionnaires, negative images were dramatically decreased.
On the other hand, in Indonesia, some people think that E.coli can be used as a machine. Our questionnaire gave Indonesian many ideas of using E.coli.
Japanese could know about E.coli and they tried to learn about E.coli and synthetic biology.
So we could make them to have interested in E.coli.
Moreover, we took a questionnaire to 50 female high school students. We asked them a image of E.coli and an interesting iGEM project.
Q1. What kind of images do you have of E.coli?
The most common answer is “dirty” and the second one is “cause for catching disease.” From this result we were aware that many female high school students feel E.coli as bad thing because they don’t have opportunities to learn about E.coli.
The reason why the TV programs only introduce its’ bad images, so young people who like to watch TV have negative images for E.coli.
Q2. How do you want to use E.coli in your lifestyle?
They want to use as devices for practical use, for example removal of the fungi (18 %)and small battery (17 %). But many of them were interested in using E.coli to exterminate harmful insects.
This project is this year’s our team’s project!
Therefore, we’re proud of our project in 2015.
