Team:Exeter/Human Practices

Introduction

Our Human Practices is centred around improving public engagement and tackling the lack of education of synthetic biology in the UK and overseas. In particular we are targeting education at a secondary school and university level, focusing on the interdisciplinary nature of the subject and assessing diversity. We want to highlight the benefits and potential applications of this new scientific field, as well as trying to uncover the reasons why synthetic biology doesn’t get as much positive attention as it should have.

We are working hard to introduce a new synthetic biology module to The University of Exeter’s curriculum, which will be available to students as soon as September 2017. For school children we have created a board game, BioMech, which educates students in key synthetic biology concepts in an easy to understand and engaging way. Furthermore, we have visited school and fairs, giving talks and running workshops where we aim to give children an introduction to what synthetic biology is and how it already affects their lives for the better.

By interviewing researchers, academics and other professionals within the scientific community and presenting their opinions in a fun and educational way, we hope to have made synthetic biology a more attractive discipline to the general public.

Education: BioMech

We initially had the idea of an educational synthetic biology board game named BioMech early on in the summer when we discovered the shocking lack of synthetic biology education in the United Kingdom. The aim of BioMech is to introduce secondary and sixth form students to scientific field in a fun and interactive way. The game teaches students to plasmid construction, biological parts and other essential biological concepts like mutation.

Why did we decide to create a board game?

After researching synthetic biology education in the UK, we discovered that there is a limited number of cheap and nationally available educational resources for biology, with many teachers needing to create their own material to inspire students. Furthermore, there is also no education in synthetic biology for secondary school or A level students.

In response to this we decided to get into contact with Edexcel, a GCSE and A Level exam board, and enquired the possibility of introducing synthetic biology in the syllabus. They responded with “iGEM could produce support resources, for the existing A level, which introduced ideas of synthetic biology and which could be used as ‘stretch and challenge’ materials by teachers”. At this point we focussed our efforts on making BioMech an easily accessible educational tool that can be used alongside the current syllabus, building on the cellular biology and genetics that are currently taught at GCSE and A-Level biology.

The aim of the game

The game teaches students about plasmid construction, biological parts and other essential biological concepts like mutation. The game starts with 10 BioBrick cards for each player who places 5 cards on the board to construct their plasmid. The winner of the round is the player that designed the plasmid that will be most useful in a randomly chosen scenario, the most appropriate plasmid is determined by card scores and player discussion. After a round, 5 more cards are dealt and the game continues, the winner is the person that wins the most rounds.

Initial testing at The Judd School (July 2016)

Playing the game

After making an initial prototype the team took the game to The Judd School, a secondary school in Tonbridge, United Kingdom, to be tested by a group of GCSE students. We started off the day by introducing the iGEM project as well as explaining a few fundamental synthetic biology terms such as BioBricks and plasmids. After forming two groups, the students began to play the game under our supervision and quickly grasped the rules. All of the students got involved with the game, often reacting enthusiastically whenever a mutation occurred in a cell.

Interviews and Feedback

Even though the game was a hit with the students, we still wanted to determine if the game was a viable option as an education resource; the game needed to be able to educate and inspire students. After the session we conducted a number of interviews with some of the students, with a few saying that they were much more likely to study biology after playing the game.

I barely knew about any of this before today, I’m definitely much more likely to take Biology for A-Level.

We interviewed two teachers at The Judd School to ask if they would consider using a learning resource such as our own in their lessons and if they thought the board game would prepare their students for entering iGEM in the coming years. The head of key stage 3, Dr Courel, thought that as the game enables students to consider real life applications for genetically modified organism, and that this would aid the students when thinking about their own iGEM project. The head of biology at Judd School, Mrs Andrew’s thought our game would make a great intermediate step between theory in the classroom, and introducing students to the wet lab.

Improvements

The Judd School visit was both a successful and productive, as we got plenty of high quality feedback from both students and teachers on how we could improve the game to educate more effectively and reach out to more schools.

The students suggested a number of minor improvements to the gameplay through a short survey, the results of this can be found here. The largest change to our game came after Mrs Andrew’s asked if she could keep a copy of the game herself. We knew that we could not afford to give board games out too everyone, so we came up with a new way to distribute our game at no cost. Our board game BioMech is now online to download for free on our wiki here, with full printing instructions. This meant that our original target of making our game accessible to all UK students was a lot more realistic.

Production

After testing the game at a couple of science conventions such as the Big Bang Fair South West and Britain Needs Scientists, we were give feedback to help us make some minor improvements. After this was complete, we began manufacturing the game. The unboxing of BioMech can be seen below:

This new version of the game was played by students from Colyton Grammar School. As part of our initiative to make BioMech accessible to as many GCSE students as possible we have began leaving copies of the game at schools free of charge, in order to benefit the education of synthetic biology for GCSE and A level students.