Card game

Conduct several interventions in schools cause is in our opinion clearly a nice way for pupils to ‘learn by doing’. During this period, we thought is was also a good idea to bring scientific knowledge outside of the classroom. That is why we came up with the idea of creating a strategy card game focused on biology. With this game, we are hoping to draw attention to the hidden world of microorganisms and make it visible elsewhere than on the bench of a scientist or inside a biology student’s notebook. We really wanted to integrate our game in an educational approach and considered it as a nice way to talk about our field of study. Many games already exist on the subject (Strain, Gusty, Bacteria Combat, Healing Blade, …) but they are mainly about antibiotics resistance whereas we wanted to bring something new by presenting some genetic aspects in biotechnology.  

The card game was indeed designed to get people to understand biodiversity, microbiology and genetics by a playful approach. It is meant to be accessible to a large audience. We created this card game in collaboration with game design students to get an attractive product we can share with as many people as possible. They also gave us a unique point of view by being both insiders of the game conception and having no advanced education in science. We thus tested it gradually with the help of scientists and general public to improve the gameplay so that it can be both fun and scientifically accurate.

We are aware that our game can raise interrogations about horizontal gene transfer and genetic engineering of living organisms, as the player acts as a bacteria colony attacking others and can grow in strength by acquiring plasmids. The main goal of our card game is to provide basic knowledge and vocabulary about biology to a young or a general audience so that they can later construct their own opinion. We therefore hope in engaging a discussion about science in society, and unleash the player’s curiosity about microbiology.

Learning through play

With the increasing use of serious games in education and corporations, it may seem obvious today that learning through games is a much more efficient and pleasing way to reach out to children or people in general. This concept seems to assume that children or even adults don’t usually enjoy learning the traditional way, but it is actually a wrong statement. Everyone do indeed love learning when it is relevant and when they can find their own motivations in it. As the main motivation for playing a game is also entertainment and is caused by curiosity, it is a perfect way to start an enjoyable learning process.

“Game-playing is a vital educational function for any creature capable of learning”
(Crawford,  The Art of Computer Game Design, 1982)

According to Malone and Lepper¹, there are 7 factors to provoke personal and interpersonal motivation. The rules and design of ‘Microbioworld’ were created around these 7 factors:

• Challenge
  

  The goal is clear: to get to 10 log of bacteria or be the last living colony; it allows the player to elaborate a strategy. Moreover, random shuffling of the cards makes it complex enough to be enjoyable.

• Curiosity
  

  The graphic designs of the cards make the game visual and attractive at first sight, and the educational booklet that explains the link between the game and the scientific reality gives the player desire to know more about what they just saw in the game. The gameplay is also arousing curiosity due to the variability of the cards and the possible combos which are making every game and strategy different.

• Control
  

  By choosing an action at the beginning of every turn, the player has a power on the outcome of the game.

• Fantasy
  

  The game illustrates a setup situation in which selected bacteria grow and develop in Petri dishes. The context of the game can be seen as a simplified model of the world where its elements and the interactions between them are used as pedagogical tools.

• Competition
  

  By attacking or dividing, players are in competition with each other and social interaction is making the game dynamic.

• Cooperation
  

  Some situations in the game (contaminant fungus, morphotype, symbiose... ) also make people create alliance and strategies together against common enemies.

• Recognition
  

  The possibility of winning the game can provide an exciting goal to reach and is a personal accomplishment that players want to achieve even if it is only an end in itself and has no further use.

Educational game design: a balance between the learning content and game content

According to Bjørner and Hansen², the most important thing to keep in mind when creating an educational game is to find the most suitable compromise between the quality and amount of learning content, and the potential of fun of the game content. That’s why we always have to think about these questions:

• Is the card game scientifically accurate and interesting?
• Are the rules and mechanisms clear enough for the game to be playable?
• Is the game comprehensive, fun and challenging enough to give a motivation for playing?
• Is the card game in accordance with ethical criteria?

They also explain that a lot of educational games fail to inform or entertain players because they are not engaging enough and also because there is no clear link between the gameplay and what the designers want to teach.

To prevent that, we used an iterative approach to design ‘Microbioworld’ which help us to answer to the previous main questions about the game. We realised that even if the player was the main actor of the design process, it was not possible to create a game without implicating different stakeholders.

Simultaneously, we asked researchers, teachers and scientists to validate the learning content, and game designers to validate the game content. Because it has to do with modifying bacteria so they can gain powers, we also requested the help of ethics experts. We also tested the game with the public that leads us to simplify the rules. Therefore, we’ve made around 10 different versions of the card game before to get the last one, Microbioworld. We used to test our different versions with our instructors and families to improve the gameplay: here you can see the team playing at the version Δ7bis after the weekly meeting:

As we want to improve our game to be perfectly balanced in the gameplay, we made a survey to take into account different comments of people who played to it. (you can see it on this page!)

We organised a Microbioworld tournament with students of the M2 "Molecular Microbiology" of the Université Paul Sabatier. We made them fill our survey : in general, people really liked the concept of the game. They was happy to find they favorit bacteria with special capacities in a game, and they found the illustrations funny (especially the chiadé plasmid). Students particularly appreciated the rigor of scientific notions mentioned in the game, but we noted that no one has the idea to consult the explicative booklet on our wiki to go further.

We also created an explicative booklet (click here to see it!) that gives more information about the game rules and mechanisms, and also explains the science underneath each card effect. As the vocabulary used in the game is specific to the biology field, it was important to define and explain the concepts that are behind it for people who would like to go further. However, it is not necessary for the players to read the whole explanations to understand how to play the game. Thus, it engages the player to demonstrate autonomy in his learning process instead of teaching him a lecture without engaging any responsibility or action on his behalf. According to the discovery learning theory, people are more likely to remember concepts and knowledge when they discover it on their own.

Create a group discussion and discard people misconceptions

The main goal of our card game was in the first place to give some basic knowledge about microbiology and synthetic biology to people who are not familiar with it, but we realized there was a risk to trigger a sensible debate about genetically engineered microorganisms. The plasmids of the game are indeed generally giving a characteristic that could be considered as a superpower used to attack other living organisms. As we wanted the game to be as much scientifically accurate as possible, this game mechanic could make people think that biologists can easily integrate dangerous genes into bacteria or create biological weapons. On the other hand, we thought creating a discussion around it could be interesting.

With the latest advances in the biotechnologies field and the media coverage they get, the general public today is already implicitly involved in the way of the technology is moving forward. That is why we thought the card game would also be a nice basis to initiate a discussion. We did not want to give any of our opinions about the subjects we brought into the game and we only described facts about biological phenomena, microorganisms and their characteristics. We have adopted an objective position to share some knowledge to those who play ‘Microbioworld’, without taking a side: we wanted them to build their own moral reflection about the risks and opportunities in modern biology.

We also took care not to present only pathogen bacteria, because it would not have reflected the natural microbiological balance and we didn’t want people to think only “mean” microorganisms exist. Furthermore, we know that our game is basically about a war between microorganisms because the “offensive powers” (plasmids) that players are using to win introduce the concept of conflict in the game. However, we wanted it to be clear that it is only a pretext to make the game fun and interactive. Indeed, war games often depict a real life simulation where the moral choices of “attacking” or “fighting” somebody or something is not made by the player but guided by the game designer. To us, there was still a need of placing the player in the center of the reflection. That is why we clarified in the game booklet what is the part of reality and what in the mechanisms was included for fun purpose only. We don’t want players of ‘Microbioworld’ to think that researchers also have fun creating super powerful bacteria to kill everyone! Which is by the way scientifically impossible.

Moreover, one of the risk of creating graphical designs of biological phenomena to attract curiosity was to create misconceptions about what these phenomena really are. For example, after interpretation of the children representations made during our interventions in schools, we concluded that children of these ages often considered microorganisms as little animal or insects. For fun purpose, the game graphic designers decided to draw bacteria with faces to personify it and we kept it that way, but there was a need to specify in the game booklet some adjustments and define precisely where the boundary between reality and artistic freedom is. We also decided to make the game accessible to children from age 10 because we thought it could be hard for primary schools children to distinguish clearly this boundary, mostly because they don’t have the necessary knowledge and critical thinking to understand that yet.

References

1. Malone, T. & Lepper (1987). Making Learning Fun: A Taxonomy of Intrinsic Motivations for Learning. In Snow, R. & Farr, M. J. (Ed), Aptitude, Learning, and Instruction Volume 3: Conative and Affective Process Analyses. Hillsdale, NJ
2. Bjørner, T., & Hansen, C. B. S. (2010). Designing an Educational Game: Design Principles from a Holistic Perspective. International Journal of Learning, 17(10), 279-290.

Researcher's night

The European Researcher’s Night is a major scientific event that gather researchers and general public in a convivial atmosphere. This is the opportunity for laboratories to communicate on their work in a creative way, and to share scientific and ethical values with the public. We especially want to thank the LISBP, our host laboratory for our iGEM experiments, that helped us for the workshop design and animation of the event. In 2017, the topic of the event was “(Im)possible?”.

Our motivations for being involved in this event were to face an adult public and change their prejudices on GMOs. We wanted people to discover our field, synthetic biology, by making them questioning themselves on GMOs through 3 approaches: biodiversity, application and legislation.

Context: how to deal with GMOs in France?

During several meetings with the french public and from our experience as biologists, we have observed that in France, most of people are afraid of GMOs and ignore why it has been created in the first place. They usually can’t tell exactly what can be done in the field of medicine, environment or even nutrition, and more important, we have noted that people use to think scientists can do anything they want in their labs with GMOs manipulation. Indeed, french press is not kind with biotechnologies. For example, we have encountered a journalist from “France Inter”, a famous radio in France, to talk about our iGEM project and he asked us not to say the word “GMO” during the interview because he didn’t want to create a polemic… It was really frustrating for us to imagine our project had to be censored before being heard by the public. We believe that we need to establish a dialogue between scientists and general public to remove prejudices.

Thus, we had to face this challenge: how to make people question themselves on synthetic biology and legislation?

Design of our game “Possible or Impossible”

Andragogy methods

As we want to encounter an adult public to establish a discussion, we needed to study teaching methods for them to be open to a dialogue: those methods are parts of the andragogy studies. We found several publications studying andragogy and we tried to highlight the main points of it for future iGEMers to get inspired on our investigation.

First, the adult learner is self-directed and has a need to be perceived by others as self-directing. When adult learners find themselves in situations in which they are not allowed to be self-directing, their reactions are “bound to be tainted with resentment and resistance”.

Second, the adult learner has accumulated life experiences that represent an essential resource for learning. When an adult learner’s experience is ignored or devalued, s/he feels rejected as a person. That is so because “to an adult learner, his experience is who he is”.

Finally, adult learners have a problem-centered approach to learning rather than a subject-centered approach. The social work adult learner wants “to apply tomorrow what he learns today, so his time perspective is one of immediacy of application” (A. Gitterman : “Interactive Andragogy: Principles, Methods, and Skills”, 2004).

Game principle

This investigation got us involved in creating a quiz game about biotechnologies, in the form of a card game. To be close of the European Researchers Night theme, “(Im)Possible?”, we’ve called this game “Possible or Impossible”: its goal is to guess if the affirmation on the top of the card is rather “Possible” or “Impossible” with an instinctive answer. We have classed our 35 cards into 3 topics: biodiversity, application and legislation (see examples below).

This game has been made for people to be autonomous: they can play without our help and they are not afraid to be wrong (which refers to the most important point of the andragony studies: the adult is a self-directed learner). Because it raises interrogations, this game has been a good approach to open a dialog with adults. We observed that people used to start the discussion explaining their own experience or thoughts on the topics that awoke their curiosity: we managed to start the discussion by developing learner’s experience, the second main point to be respected in an andragogy approach.

	Those questions aim to introduce several biodiversity particularities.
	These cards aim to demystify the french legislation on GMOs to people. Their goal is to break the prejudices of the public on the use of genetically modified microorganisms in french labs.
	These questions highlight several examples of GMOs applications on different fields (health, environment, industry…)

Our workshop: a synthetic biology learning circuit

In order to follow the year’s thematic “(Im)Possible”, we chose to focus our workshop on the incredible features of biodiversity, how to use it in synthetic biology, and what are legal limits on GMO use in France. To do this, we’ve designed a circuit of workshops for people to follow a logical discovery path: raising curiosity first, then make people question themselves on synthetic biology capabilities and limits, thus make them practice scientific experiments, in order to finally open a debate to go further.

Click on one of the workshops to know more about it!

Question yourself on GMO capabilities and legal limits with our quizz “Possible or Impossible”

Conference

In order to bring scientists, students and teachers together around synthetic biology, we organised a conference at Université Paul Sabatier which is the science campus of the Toulouse university. Our motivation was to open up the debate on ethics in synthetic biology with a concerned public through the intervention of specialists from the ethics, biotechnologies and synthetic biology fields. It was also a good opportunity to introduce iGEM in Toulouse and to gather former iGEMers of the Toulouse team.

Program of the conference

Kaymeuang Cam: Introduction on synthetic biology

Kaymeuang Cam: Researcher at IPBS, Professor of genetic microbiology at Université Paul Sabatier and PI of iGEM Toulouse last years

Mr Cam made a presentation to introduce synthetic biology, making comparison between electronic engineering and the use of biobricks. He summarized the key milestones that made the history of this particular field in science.

Gilles Truan: iGEM and openscience

Gilles Truan: Lab director at LISBP and former PI of iGEM team Toulouse

Mr Truan explained to the audience the principle of iGEM competition and the particularity of the registry, a perfect example of open science. The goal of his intervention was to make people realise that there is other ways to publish experimental results in science and that there are alternatives to patents.

Bettina Couderc : Biotechnologies and health

Bettina Couderc: Researcher at CRCT and Professor of Biotechnology at Université Paul Sabatier

Mrs Couderc illustrated several aspects of biotechnologies: genome editing, cell therapy and genetic therapy. Her intervention had for main goal to show what are the last breakthroughs in health research, and what are its perspectives in our society; she introduced ethical reflexions on the use of genetic engineering for health.

Vincent Grégoire-Delory: Synthetic biology and ethics

Vincent Grégoire-Delory: director of “Ecole supérieure d’éthique des sciences” (superior school of science ethics) and Professor at “Institut Catholique de Toulouse” (catholic institute)

Mr Grégoire Delory made an introduction on ethics in synthetic biology, a field in which people are used to consider living things are like machines. We came back to the definition of life: what is a living organism ? He tried to make people questions theirselves on the frontier between natural and artificial things. (see the paragraph 2. below for more informations on ethics in synthetic biology!). We were really pleased to see that those presentations raised a public debate on twitter (see the paragraph 3. below!).

Sarah Guizou: E. calculus project

Sarah Guizou: Former iGEMer of the first iGEM Toulouse team in 2013

Sarah came back in Toulouse to talk about her experience of iGEM. Her project, E. calculus is at the frontier of biology and mathematics. (see more on their wiki). It was really interesting to talk about mathematics in synthetic biology after the intervention of Vincent Grégoire-Delory.

Benoit Pons and Marine Pons: Api Coli project

Benoit Pons and Marine Pons: former iGEMers of the iGEM Toulouse team in 2015

Marine and Benoit presented us their project Api Coli, a synthetic biology regulation project to fight against the varroa, a bees parasite. (see more on their wiki)

Camille Roux and Manon Barthe: Paleotilis project

Camille Roux and Manon Barthe: Members of the iGEM Toulouse team last year

Camille and Manon presented the same prezi they made last year for the Giant Jamboree and explained their project Paleotilis to the audience. They engineered B. subtilis to kill fungus that destroy the rock painting of the Lascaux cave in France. (see more on their wiki)

iGEM Toulouse 2017: Croc’n Cholera project

Exactly one month before Boston, this conference was also the opportunity to test our presentation and our ability to answer questions of a scientific public. We were glad to present our work to formers iGEMers of our team, to the guests, to some of our teachers who came for the occasion and to all the students who came at the conference.

Convivial buffet for further discussions

After the conference, everybody was invited to a buffet to exchange and continue discussions in a friendly ambiance. We had a good time with formers iGEMers, who exchange with us about their experience of iGEM and gave us some secret fun facts about our iGEM instructors… We noted that people were feeling comfortable to talk about ethics after several glasses of Gaillac, an excellent white wine from the region of Toulouse!

Awareness on the “living-machine”: Can we consider the living as a technical object?

Here is a short summary we made on several ethical questionings highlighted by Vincent Gregoire-Delory after the conference for people that consult our web site to get access on it!

Living organisms are not technical objects: they can form themselves from different parts whereas those of the second one are just put together by a designer. However, transplants, organ donation or genetic complementations show us that we can replace defective parts of a living organism just like a machine… In these conditions, can we consider the living as a technical object?

The point is to know if this comparison has a meaning by questioning ourselves on the relation between art, technique and nature to establish a frontier separating natural and artificial things. Farming and genetics has made some living beings (that already existed independently from human) products of industry and technology. Fruits that we’re consuming, farmed animals, our own body modified by our alimentation, or even the different postures imposed by the use of machines are all artificials things created by our civilisation that made our lives far from the natural processes. Science has moved the frontier between natural and artificial. Do we have to keep this frontier between living and technical tools? Do we have to consider living beings, that are conscious and have feelings like technical tools? Must we criticize this comparison by putting ethics before technics and biology?

These are all the questions that we must ask ourselves as scientists, and more so as synthetic biologists, when we are working in our labs! Here begins ethical questionings and awareness.