Our Center Director Prof. Hon-Ming Lam, in collaboration with the Big Education Platform, initiated an innovative STEAM Education project – STEAM@Soybean for Hong Kong secondary school students in 2018. With its success last year, the project has recruited the second batch of participating schools, and started the STEAM@Soybean 2019.
In January 2020, the project has come to the 3rd Phase – Investigation. This year, students would have a taste in the current research project Prof. Lam’s research team is working on. They will try to cross breed the disease-resistant soybean cultivars in South Africa with the stress-resistant soybean cultivar developed by Prof. Lam, to develop a new soybean cultivar for the use in reviving South Africa’s marginal lands.
In the preparation workshop, Prof. Lam first introduced on the theoretical basis, and the conventional & modern technologies of seed breeding, including crossing, radiation, GM and genome editing. Ms. Ling Wong, research associate of Prof. Lam’s Lab then demonstrated on-site the crossing techniques. Participating students showed great interest in the breeding exercise, and were all excited to kick-start their own breeding research at schools.
