Public Engagement

In harmony with the BioTROJAN conception of caring about a local issue (vector-borne diseases), one of our main human practices approach was based on to care about another serious brazilian issue: lack of quality materials for scientific and educational purpose.

With this in mind, we brought to portuguese speaking community scientific and educational materials in which they can get interesting and reliable information, besides how they can improve such materials! For this purpose we brought BioMech, a high quality, iGEM developed, synbio game and we organized the first brazilian edit-a-thon for biology related subjects.

BioMech

BioMech is a board game that integrates concepts of molecular and cellular biology along with creativity to create solutions to as more diverse situations and all of it in a synthetic biology approach! The game was developed by the iGEM team of University of Exeter and presented on the last iGEM competition (2016). One of our current members was there and played the game, it was such a cool experience that he introduced us to the game this year. We loved BioMech as well so we asked to the Exter team it we could use it, and they agreed. So we translated the game from English to Brazilian Portuguese, version that can be accessed and downloaded here.

We have seen how the BioMech was easily assimilated by people and useful in transmitting knowledge. The game was applied at the “Semana Temática da Biologia”, in english “Thematic Week of Biology” (TWB), an annual biology event that happens at Institute of Biosciences of University of São Paulo, where BioMech was played by college students (target audience of TWB).

The players just needed a little explanation of how the game works and then they got involved by the problem they have to solve. We were amazed with the constructions and proposals of solutions that the players found, some a little bit funny and some well elaborated but both well thought out and argued. And that is one of the characteristics of the the game, to arouse argumentation and defense of a viewpoint.

Just as we desired, BioMech showed to be a fun and simple way to learn about synthetic biology, and having this type of game available in our language is by itself a great achievement. Because we need new and stimulant ways of learning which are interesting to people, even more when talking about a subject that is unfamiliar to most people like Synthetic Biology is, and we are really proud of it.

Survey - evaluating the application of the game

Before each new player enjoyed the game and received the instructions of how to play it, we talked to them about BioTROJAN and the issue of mosquito-borne diseases. We think that to play BioMech and to know BioTROJAN concepts has the power of improve the players' knowledge of the topics covered. In order to verify the possible impact of BioMech on its players, we did a survey comparing two groups: BioMech Players (Group 1) and Non-BioMech Player (Group 2).

The survey was applied to Group 1 after its played BioMech and to Group 2 without having played BioMech, all of the survey’s participants were life sciences undergraduate students from 18 to 24 years old. We only did the survey with N = 9 for both groups, the limiting factor was Group 1. With the support of Psychology Prof. Marcelo, from University of São Paulo, who advised us to do a survey with open-ended questions to measure the "word strength" looking for the words incidence, we did a survey in which the participants had to read a phrase or a topic and answer in 15 seconds the first words that came in mind. We got interesting data:

Analysis and results

In the analysis of the data obtained, the "word strength" was measured by the incidence of word/term given as answer. Answer with a single occurrence in our data were disregarded, to avoid pollution of responses and to better provide the visualization and interpretation of generated graphs.

Insect-borne Disease

It is possible to see the contrast between the two groups, which are: (i) Group 1 shows up a higher number of terms that are given as sharing answers among the participants of the group itself than Group 2. In addition, looking at the terms that are shared between both groups, (ii) Group 1 in most cases has higher incidents of those. In part, these quantitative features are preserved too in all of the next questions as well.

Prevention and control of insect-borne disease

Although here the phenomenon (ii) was not followed, (i) is preserved and something interesting happened: Group 1 gave "Paratransgenisis" as an answer, which is the approach used on BioTROJAN to combat vector-borne diseases, that's an evidence showing that Group 1 was influenced in its answers.

Transgenics: benefits and dangers

For this question terms related to food and modification of an organism's feature appear at equal frequencies in both groups, but Group 1 as usually gave higher amount of terms.

Despite the low amostral number of participants we were able to notice the pattern of response of the groups. BioMech player group, generally, showed up a more variety of terms and in a higher frequency, besides displayed clearly that its answers was influenced for BioMech and BioTROJAN concepts.

Wikipedia edit-a-thon

Realizing that the openness of iGEM is in agreement with the principles of the Wikipedia, the world’s most used source of information, we organized the first brazilian edit-a-thon for biology related subject!

Even though Brazil has a number of great research labs and millions of university students, wikipedia articles in portuguese are of much lower quality than the ones in English. Moreover, people are not trained and empowered to change this and so to improve it with their own expertise. Thus providing and stepping stone for bringing people closer to the “Open Knowledge” world is also set to change the culture of the restricted academic knowledge in Brazil.

Teaming up with Wikipedia Brasil and the USP Synthetic Biology Club, we organized a pilot event, with team members, people from university laboratories, start-ups and even high school students. Even though few people participated, we managed to add more than 6000 new words to the wikipedia and, more importantly, introduced people to the world of open science!

This official edit-a-thon, with support of the Brazilian Wikipedia, and it will be the basis for many more to come. The event was shared with people around Brazil and we got feedback from people from different cities and states that now want to organize and/or take part on further events, empowering people to produce good and open content. We are excited to see how, in the future years, this small initiative could empower people to make science more open,