Team:USTC-China/Human practice
From 2011.igem.org
![](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2011/3/31/%E6%A0%87%E9%A2%98%E6%A0%8F%E6%9C%80%E7%BB%88%E6%8E%A8%E8%8D%90%E6%9C%89%E5%AD%97%E7%89%88.png)
Human Practice
Open Day
From May. 14 to May. 15, we have conducted the visiting activity in our lab as part of the “Open Day of Biox ” program. It is an important component of the Week of Science of USTC, which is an annual event aimed at promoting the spread of science and an unusual chance for the public to get to know what science really is. During these days many of our school’s labs will be accessible for people from the outside to enter and volunteers majoring in these fields will be there as instructors. This year more than 4000 people visited our institute in two days.
What we have done is of much significance in that not only college students but also people at work and the elderly were involved in our activity. Considering in our city nowadays it is not often that a person whose profession is not science can get to know this much about a novel field, our work has contributed a lot to the development of this study outside the campus.
Aware of the potential chance for us to make synthetic biology known by more people, we decided to make our lab part of this activity. After two weeks’ discussion and preparation, we have reached a detailed plan. The whole process consists of videos& explanations, forums& lectures, introductions of equipments, games& interactions and survey. Each section stands for different goals and all of them turned out to be truly effective.
![USTCopen2.jpg](/wiki/images/3/33/USTCopen2.jpg)
We have used two movies made by teams of iGEM 2010 to provide the audience a vivid image of synthetic biology. A documentary video focusing on the life of our iGEM 2010 team members was also played in order to make this competition known by more. Every day we held two lectures concretely introducing what synthetic biology really is to make our citizens aware of the connection between our research and their daily life. On condition that no one would get injured, we arranged for several team members to explain the characters and usages of our equipments such as the PCR instrument and the centrifuge. We also showed them how to use some of the instruments in a simplified way. For primary school students and kids we designed a game for them. Paper DNA models were used to make it easier to understand the basic structure of DNA. They were also encouraged to make a model themselves. For visitors beyond the age of 12 questionnaires about the public awareness of synthetic biology and concerns about everyday life and ethics were prepared for them to answer according to their own thoughts.
==Survey==