Demonstrate - BioMech: Board Game
Overview
BioMech is an educational board game designed to introduce younger students to synthetic biology in an enjoyable but thought provoking way. This learning resource was meant to aid teachers who wished to introduce students to synthetic biology. In order for this resource to be a viable option for teachers it had to be concise, fun and most importantly free of charge.
A full write up of the production and testing of BioMech can be found here. Additionally, BioMech along with a full instructions manual can be seen and downloaded here.
This page will briefly summarize our achievements and goals for the future.
Achievements:
- Produce an educational resource that introduces the basic concepts of synthetic biology
- Make this resource available to all for free by allowing BioMech to be downloaded from our wiki
- Test and refine the design of the board game by playing it with GCSE students. This was an ongoing process that greatly changed the rules to fit the knowledge of our target audience
- Distribute fully printed versions of our board game to schools inside and out of the UK
As this was not a scientific experiment this aspect of our project didn’t have failures, but instead targets for the future that we simply didn’t have time to complete.
Future:
- Continue to distribute fully printed versions of BioMech
- Produce a braille version of BioMech to further the number of people who can play our game
- Possibly scaling the game to different difficulties to not only supplement the GCSE syllabus, but also to others