Community Lab
In order to spread the idea of “synthetic biology” to public, we did a lot of brainstorms and came up with plenty of ideas, one of which was to cooperate with Zhejiang Science and Technology Museum (ZJSTM) and exhibit a series of activities to a wide range of people.
After a long and profound discussion with the principal of the museum, we noticed that building up a community lab must be an excellent way to introduce “synthetic biology” to the public and ZJSTM would provide us with a certain place for this lab.
Months later, the building of a small lab especially for presentation of life science was completed. The walls of the community lab were especially designed to be made of glass. They are transparent so all visitors of the museum, even children at low age, can watch the whole procedure of some biology experiments with out any risk.
To make full use of the lab and other resources provided by ZJSTM, lots of thoughts were put on how to make the activities presented entertaining while educational.
Children were doing experiments in our lab.
Children were doing experiments in our lab.
Our lab in March.
During March, we displayed the experiment of fruit DNA extraction to some young children and instructed them to do the experiment by their own. A seminar with some high school teachers and students was held in the museum and a discussion about how to start and get involved into IGEM took place, which partly contributed to the foundation of Hangzhou No.4 High School and Hangzhou No.14 High School iGEM team.
Later in June, we presented an activity especially for high school IGEMers and other students interested in synthetic biology. Dr.Zhang Haoqian, who was the team leader of Peking iGEM 2011 and now a doctor doing research about synthetic biology, was invited to give a speech. The high school IGEMers then got the chance to try an experiment called Rainbow Kit, which is one of the achievements of the University of Alberta iGEM 2009. All students participating in the activity learnt a lot while having great fun.
In August, a carnival of synthetic biology was held in STM with our unique “Poly Cards” game, which taught citizens to know more about synthetic biology and our project.
ZJU-China has a plan to keep going on the construction of our community lab, which counts a lot. It’s a nice try of getting public to know something about real science and technology in such a vivid way based on the community lab built by us. Till now, we’ve got some essential equipment in the lab such as pipettes, clean benches, centrifuge, water bath. We will definitely buy new equipment to fulfill the lab. White board and microwave oven is right on the way while dry block heaters are on our list already. To promote influence of our community lab, we start to work out more interesting activities for public. Since we’ve got those science equipment, it will be much easier for us to achieve that goal. ZJU-China will go on collaborating with ZJSTM to share science knowledge as well as synthetic biology with citizens.
