The activities of FHS at UM Open Day receive overwhelming response

The University of Macau (UM) held the Open Day on 17 January. The Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) organized a series of diversified and interactive activities and received overwhelming response from local high school students and residents.

During the Open Day, FHS prepared a rich variety of interactive activities for students, parents and the residents, including game booths related to biomedical sciences, DIY hand sanitizer workshops, lab tour, hands-on experiments of total colony counting and admission sharing, to showcase the programme features, research achievements and faculty facilities.

Mr. Ao Ieong, a Form 4 student of Colégio Mateus Ricci, joined the lab tour, total colony counting experiments and admission sharing with his classmates. He and his classmates were all amazed with the state-of-the-art equipment of animal facility and the cores. Through the professional and interesting introduction of Prof. Terence Chuen Wai POON, the students came to know that laboratory animals can only be bred in accordance with the accredited standards and excellent animal experimental conditions. They were astonished at the demanding and scrupulous research work. Mr. Ao Ieong enjoyed the hands-on experiments in which they performed the colony counting. He expressed his hope to participate in similar activities of FHS in the future.

Mr. Chen, a PhD student of a local higher educational institute, visited FHS to obtain admission information for his friend. He had taken courses of biomedical sciences during his undergraduate studies. Thus, he was very interested in the game booths of FHS. He thought that the games were designed with distinctive features, and he was glad to attain some biomedical knowledge via the game booth “Decoding gene, easy or fussy?” in which he was shown with the breast cancer susceptibility gene.

Mrs. Wu joined the game booths and the DIY hand sanitizer workshop with her family in the hope of expanding her eight-year-old son’s horizons and nurturing his spirit of loving science. She recognized the meaningfulness of the workshop which helped strengthening participants’ awareness of the epidemic. In addition, the participants could acquire some simple biological knowledge through hand-making the sanitizers. She also praised the staff and students at the game booths who explained with simplicity and brevity by integrating the common knowledge of daily life into biomedical science. She complimented the game booth “A big big world under a mic microscope” at which her son got a golden chance to observe the bacteria (staphylococcus aureus) and the cancer cells via those research-grade microscopes.

The various activities of FHS were interactive and distinctive with unique features, and were attended by participants with enormous enthusiasm at the Open Day.