Team:ShanghaiTech China/Public Engagement
Game Design
We made a PC game to promote the concept of synthetic biology, where players build their own bacteria to accomplish different missions. The game provides different coding genes and regulatory components to players. The players need to assemble them to build new bacteria strain. The aim of this game is to help the public to experience the process of using basic blocks to change life, which happens in real synthetic biology laboratories. This game might be an ideal platform to demonstrate iGEM projects. Developers can put any genes, strains, or mechanisms into this game. In future, we will design different levels and genes related to their projects, aiming to make the player better understand the concept of iGEM and synthetic biology.
Video demonstration
Features
This section will show the main interfaces of the game.
Main Menu
Level Selection
In-game View
Lab--Gene Editing Interface
Map Editor
Feedback
We received valuable feedback from different players.
We have released this game to high school and university students who do not major in biology. They showed strong interest to our game and Furthermore, we have been collecting different players’ feedback and rates of the game to improve our project.
Some comments from players：
Innovative.
Strong education significance.
Amazing opening.
Beautiful UI. Nice scene switches effect.
Detailed level description
Challenging
Never have seen the game of this kind. The gameplay is very new.
Free map editor is a highlight. The interface is user-friendly and convenient.
Excellent as a demo.
Impressive design of UI and scene.
Need professional knowledge to play.
High school students playing our game
Students from ShanghaiTech playing our game
View players' comment
Highlights
This game is completely developed by undergraduate student but with professional standards. We used Unity and Github for development. It is also the first game that simulates the mechanism of synthetic biology. In this game, we realized the process of cell division, metabolism, species competition, gene editing and so on. Therefore, it is easy and interesting enough to attract mainstream players and hardcore enough to communicate the professional knowledge to them. We believe that this project will build an example of putting games into the field of education.
Game release
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Education
Presently, there is an unignorable gap between textbook learning and the actual personal ambition among Chinese students. The development of design thinking for biology experiments can hardly be achieved without a clear cognition of the meaning of laboratory work and an interest in the discipline. As an emerging discipline that uses engineering principles to design and assemble biological components, the standardized bio-brick, and engineered experiments procedure provides students with lower barriers to experience the methods of synthetic biology firsthand. This year we held five lessons for junior high school students from six junior high schools in Shanghai, instructing them to perform their first biology experiment with basic synthetic biology knowledge and arouse their interest in synthetic biology.
Our lessons were divided into five different topics: “The fundamental idea of Synthetic Biology”, “Construction of basic Biological components”, “Common Biotechnologies for advanced studies”, “Fancy applications for Synthetic Biology” and “Cultivation for biological scientific literacy”. Since our students know little about Synthetic Biology, we break down boring texts into comic pictures and emoticons which teenagers are familiar with and build up basic conceptions using vivid and interesting language. Moreover, after introducing the rapid development of biotechnology, we set our team’s project as an example, showing how problems can be solved by combining methods mentioned wisely. What we tried to do is to raise the interest of the junior high school students in synthetic biology, spread scientific thoughts, and teach them how to think and solve problems like real biologists.
Gratifyingly, after five lessons, these adorable junior high school students showed great interest in synthetic biology and basic scientific literacy when we guide them to do experiments by themselves. For instance, one of the students became curious whether drug-resistant germs exist in the breathing air of the intestinal environment which may lead to serious diseases. We also share our project this year to the junior high students, and showed them that genes are not mysterious and untouchable, they can be studied and used with proper method and technology.
Through our teaching, students expressed interest in iGEM and biology experiments, wishing to do their scientific research in the future. From naïve views to advanced thinking, we expanded their cognition with what we learned from our experience.
iGEM Club
Continuity of the knowledge, experience, and memory of participating in iGEM are other points our team would like to emphasize. At the very beginning of last year, the iGEM club was set in our school by our seniors. This year, our iGEM club has grown much larger and attracts members from various majors.
Regular academic meetings and activities have been passed on as a tradition, and by occasionally inviting professors giving lectures about synthetic biology, we are helping students to build basic understandings of iGEM and synthetic biology, and inspiring them to further explore the tremendous potential of cross-disciplines between their various majors and synthetic biology.
Our team meeting takes up the form of laboratory group meetings and was given by team members who want to share their opinions on synthetic biology. Frontier technologies are introduced as well as synthetic biology applications. iGEM club is a direct way for students in ShanghaiTech to approach iGEM, which helps develop the love and understand of finding an interesting idea about synthetic biology. We hope our team’s spirit as iGEMer can be shared in this way.
Video
In cooperation with Tianjin University, ShanghaiTech_China iGEM team and other ShanghaiTech students finished the video together named “the Adventure of three bacteria”. The video was made to introduce three kinds of bacteria commonly used in the labs with a short story to realize our aim which is to popularize synthetic biology and iGEM.
The video is about an adventure of three kinds of bacteria, BL21, TOP10 and DH5α. Its content and style are fit both for children and for those who know a little about synthetic biology, which is a quite new and adorable way to let people have access to synthetic biology and iGEM. We uploaded the video on Bilibili (a video website, https://www.bilibili.com/video/av70112377).