Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai/Engagement
EngagementPalette 2048
This year, our team has developed a game: Palette 2048.
The overlay of colors is an important part of our life. The mixing of three primary colors produces delicate hues that embellish the world we live in. Color overlay is also inevitably related to the multi-factor visual inspection that we designed. The team has learned the mechanism of color overlay, and in the process of promoting and investigating our project, we found that people's understanding of the color mixing principles was generally insufficient. Therefore, it is necessary to disseminate knowledge on these principles. In order to facilitate interaction, we chose to develop an online game, which attracts viewers, explains abstract concepts, and improves people’s understanding of our projects. If you want to know more about our game, do not hesitate. First click here and enjoy a wonderful palette game!
Our game design idea is very simple: make the game attractive and at the same time implant the concept of color mixing that we aim to promote. We hope that our "palette 2048" players can:
1. realize how different colors in our lives can be mixed to produce more variety of colors
2. understand that there are three primary colors that constitute all colors in our lives
3. enhance the sensitivity and awareness of colors
4. learn the difference between primary colors of light and primary colors of pigment
Based on the response from our game participants, we believe that the palette has successfully achieved our educational goals. Most of the players said that they realized the wonderful outcome from the mixing of colors. In addition, they provided a lot of novel ideas for the improvement of our game:
1. Players said that the game did not explicitly guide players to be aware of how the colors mix. We could have set the winning criteria to be getting a specific color block, or ask the players to create a specific color block for a certain number of times.
2. Other players said that the game can be designed into stage mode: different levels require different patterns of color mixing. In this way, the game will work better in achieving our goal.
In the future, we want to increase the number of tutorials provided to the player. For example, we can incorporate the fluorescent luminescence mechanism into our game: you can use a button to target a block and change its color. We believe that this can help people understand the corresponding mechanism of fluorescence.
Game Description:
Most people are not familiar with the principle of color mixing. We want to show that mixing different colors can produced a variety of visually-appealing effects. We’ve created a game to popularize this knowledge in an interesting and interactive way.
In this game, you can move the numbered color blocks on the screen, stack the blocks together, the numbers on the joined blocks will add up and be recorded in the total score. Each time you move the color block, the game generates an additional Number 2 color block. You increase your score through joining the color blocks. Getting a total score of 2048 is your ultimate goal in this game, but you can go beyond that score, too.
Our Palette 2048 game is built using Java. The game has a web version and a touch device version.
Bringing Scientific Knowledge to Poor Mountainous Areas
Social justice is an important issue that we care about. As we all know, China is a developing country. Throughout the country, economic and social development is relatively unbalanced and uneven: the east develops faster than west, and cities grow faster than rural areas. It is difficult for people in the western mountainous areas to acquire the same information and education accessible in the eastern cities.
Our team collaborated with a social practice group in our school. From the eastern international metropolis Shanghai, to the western Eryuan County in Yunnan District; from an altitude of 5 meters, to the Antarctic villages 2700 meters above sea level, we brought a unique lesson on organisms and synthetic biology to the children in Eryuan.
We started with the concept of organism, clarifying what a living creature is. An organism consists of cells, which contains structure such as organelles and nuclei. We further explained that synthetic biology changes the structure inside the nucleus, giving the creature the desired traits.
Throughout the lesson, we let the children brainstorm what they wanted to use synthetic biology for. Some children wanted their dogs to grow wings and carry them to the sky, and others said they wanted their families' rice to harvest forever...
We hope to use our knowledge to help people in underdeveloped regions by providing lessons and sharing experiences for the next generation, so we joined the team working on the elementary school curriculum. We were mainly engaged in designing and teaching interesting biology classes. The children were very fond of us. We hope that our courses will have an impact on their lives, and that they will use their new knowledge to change their destiny.
Into the community
We went to a local park to carry out a one-day science program. We introduced our project to the local residents and also disseminated information on synthetic biology.
We took out fun puzzles, engaging local kids to hands-on learning of biology; we set up display boards and presented our projects to the pedestrians; we distributed our team postcards to better advocate our team’s work for iGEM.
Many residents were very interested in our project and stopped to listen. Some even stayed with us and inquired about further information!
Microbial Painting
We organized a "Micro World Design Creative Contest" with student organizations in the university. Contestants could submit one of three types of works: microbial painting, immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence slice design, or micro photography. All works were submitted are online. The final score would consist of expert scoring and online voting.
We hope that through this competition, students can show their free thinking and excellent craftsmanship with the combination of creativity and aesthetics. At the same time, the exciting contest helps us publicize biological knowledge.
After the evaluation, we have selected one 1st prize, two 2nd prize, four 3rd prize. The following is their brilliant design ideas:
We have collected some feedbacks from the participants on their experience. A classmate wrote: "When creating the artwork, I was a biology student devoted to art, admiring the mystery and romance of nature and life. Now I’ve become an art graduate with a background in biology. For me, Bio Art is not only about innovations in tools and materials, but more about exploring human culture with our own perspectives on “life”. Thanks to this competition, which broke the barrier between rigorous science and romantic art, letting all of us feel "the art of the future".
It can be fully demonstrated that this activity has accomplished our goal—the organic combination of science, life, and beauty.
SJTUer's Day (Alumni Open Day)
In SJTU, the celebration festival is an annual grand event. In this festival, thousands of people gather in SJTU, celebrating their own festival. This year, we seized this opportunity to show biology to hundreds of tourists, mostly teenagers and children.
Our activities for SJTUer’s Day are:
1, biological knowledge contest
2, codon bracelet production
3, biological puzzle
First of all, we had designed a set of questions about synthetic biology, latest biotechnology and iGEM competition knowledge. If people participate in, they will get a DNA ring. The activity effectively enhances public awareness of synthetic biology and iGEM. At the same time we have a question for everyone "If you take part in iGEM competition, what project will you design?" We collected answers to this question:
1, Achieving binary coding with bacteria
2, Synthesizing organelles, perform normally;
3, Using the recombinant DNA to synthesize liposomes
4, To degrade the plastic with genetically modified E. coli
5, To study proto-oncogene regulation of immortal tissue
6, Gene splicing to make bacteria produce drugs
7, Gene editing to synthesize of hemoglobin / fluorescent protein
...
These answers really surprised us. People were able to come up with good ideas after participating our activities and education. Some ideas can even take as an iGEM project idea! Through our efforts in spreading knowledge, people are able to understand synthetic biology and even have their own understanding!
In addition, we designed several biology puzzles, which attracted a lot of children to participate in playing. The activity enhanced their ability in making things and curiosity of biology.
We also help some of the participants to produce codon bracelets. We asked the participants to write down the words they want to have, using the amino acids abbreviation. And then referred to the codon reference table (we made some fine-tuning, the list is as follows). Finally, we used the codon alpha to make bracelet, which attracted a lot of participants. We taught people the biological protein synthesis using genetic code in an interesting way.
To attract more people to our booth, we produced some beautiful postcards about the project and iGEM.
Official Account and team page
Social media plays a very important role in the publicity of the team. This year, our team gets in touch with public mainly through official account and web pages. The official account and the team page are considered as team SJTU-BIOX-Shanghai's public platform. We hope our team set up since 2009 can be recognized as a unity and have a good heritage which benefits our team in the long run.
1, Official Account
We created our own official account on WeChat. In China, nowadays, the form of official account is popular, which is a platform for interaction with the public. People who have followed us will receive our messages and articles. They can also send messages to us to communicate. We have posted some synthetic biology knowledge and our concept of project design on the platform.
On SJTUers’ day, we promoted our official account to participants, with more than 200 people following to account and answering questions through the platform (mentioned in SJTUers’ Day part).
We regularly post our project pictures and latest information. So far our official account has been published a lot information about the team, about the project, and about the content of synthetic biology.
Social media is a valuable outreach tool because it allows us to share more specific details of our experiments and the upcoming activities we are going to hold. The official account allows us to reach a wider audience.
We hope that this platform can pass down to the next school team, having continuous publishment.
At the same time, we want to recommend this form of publicity to every Chinese team. Because team wikis change every year, and in China, wiki publicity is not so popular, using the public number as a line Platform promotion is a good form.
2, web pages
In order to improve the inheritance of the entire team, we have designed our own team website, which shows the history of all SJTU-BioX-Shanghai teams, awards and project overview. This website forms a team vertical timeline. This design can also be used by other iGEM team.
Laboratory Open Day
Many freshmen in our university are eager for more knowledge about the laboratory and biological research. So we held a laboratory open day at the beginning of the semester. We talked about the microbiology with visiting students in synthetic biology, research programs and iGEM competition. It is excited to attract students who were interested in participating our iGEM team in the future. We led freshmen to visit labs, and taught them the functions of different devices as well as showing our team videos and posters. For many students, this was their first visit to an advanced biological laboratory. Many of them were impressed by our well managed laboratory.
Participate in Social Practice Projects
SJTU holds a summer social practice program in every summer, aiming to encourage students to go out of the campus and to do social investigation. We seized the opportunity to start a program combining with our HP activities. Because our project has well illustrated the interaction of science and society, so we were honored the title of "Top Ten Project". We participated in a project exhibition to show our project to others, which exhibited in the school library for a week. During our presentation, there were many teachers and students listening. They got to know our team and gave some suggestions to our team.
Survey
Because our project intends to do research on heavy metals, we hope that our human practices will influence more citizens. So, we should get to know people’s awareness on issues of heavy metals. Therefore, we conducted a survey about heavy metals. We have sent a total of 445 questionnaires,and have got 445 replies. Among all 445 questionnaires are valid.
The data we obtained in the questionnaire are as follows:
The survey results show that the majority of people believe that heavy metal pollution will damage the human nervous system, immune system, skeletal system and do great harm to human and plant growth. There are still some people believe that heavy metal pollution can make river water smelly, however, that's not ture.
Since the above results show that people still have little knowledge of heavy metal pollution, there exist significance for us to do public science education.
The ratio of men to women was roughly balanced. Ages of respondents are mainly between 20 to 30 years old and 40 years old to 50 years old. In addition, the region and occupation of respondents are evenly distributed.
