Team:HFUT-China/HP/Gold Integrated
Human Practice
Overview
Following the main idea of our human practice project, we added more meaningful content to it. The original project have been illustrated in the silver page. One of the highlights of our integrated human practice project is the VR-open day. After finishing the VR game, we decided to popularize it to the public. That’s how we came up with the idea of a VR open-day.
Virtual reality (VR) is a cutting-edge visualization technology, an interactive 3-D dynamic vision and behavior simulation system that combines heterogeneous information. It can achieve really impressive effects when serving as a teaching tool, because people tend to accept graphically described things. We want to take the advantage of VR technology to help more people learn about Synthetic Biology in an interesting, easy-to-accept way. And at the meantime, we want people to know about our project through the game.
About The Game
First of all, here is a brief introduction of the game itself and its reward mechanism.
The design of our rewarding mechanism is inspired by the main function of our system: searching. Trying to find useful information in a huge database is like searching for a needle in the ocean, which is arduous. We want to create an enjoyable moment for users when they really catch something.
The award is designed as a “magnifier” floating in the air. By touching it, players can get the award which can automatically complete the unfinished gene chains in your container.
Laymen like primary school students will be able to learn some basic knowledge on Synthetic Biology, such as the structure of parts, the concept of promoters and terminators, through collecting and assembling BioBricks repetitively.
VR Open Day
Actually, we split this part into three steps.
Firstly, we invited our classmates who major in software engineering to try our game thinking that they could give some solid suggestions about the game and we could make the game more fun according to the advices. As a result, they gave high praise to the game uniformly, and also pointed out that the color didn’t perfectly match in the interface. According to their feedback, our designers changed the color and made it look more comfortable.
Secondly, we invited some biologists to our lab to play the game and give us their professional ideas. They had fun playing it and thought it was a really good idea to conduct the popularization of biology through a VR game, which follows the trend of the times. Furthermore, they gave some advices about the biobricks. They thought biobricks shouldn’t be generated stochastically but should follow the real gene-formation rule. We thought it was really a good idea. With some tips in the game, players won’t feel too confused of the operation and can learn the gene rule at the meantime.
Finally, we opened up our lab and welcomed students from all majors to play it. Players had a good time in our lab, especially freshmen and sophomores. They are curious and willing to learn about synthetic biology through playing our game. While they were playing the game, we also interviewed some of them about their comments about the game and how much they had learned about synthetic biology. There were a few students could even recall the detailed structure of a gene. Many players were confused of the symbols of "magnifier". After listening to our explanation, they became more interested in our project. To conclude, what we have achieved have far surpassed what we had expected. We seemed to lead a synthetic biology heat in our school. Of course, this success owes much to the propaganda of the comers to our open day.
Conclusion
We achieved the combination of the fundamental concept of iGEM with the design game—creating new bioBricks using existing ones. Our game provides a simple and easy way for players who stay far away from Synthetic Biology for fear of its complexity and difficulty. Only with more and more people’s engagement can Synthetic Biology continue to flourish.
As a simulation system, VR is updatable, which means the game can keep up with the times and maintain its freshness in this quickly changing world. We deeply hope VR could play a supporting role in the development of Synthetic Biology, as well as increase the happiness of all iGEM participants.
Question
1. What advantages do you think VR has over general ways of science popularization?
2. How do you think of the design of this game?
3. Have you known how to assemble a gene chain now?
4. What advice can you give to us?
