Team:Wellesley TheTech/Project/Overview

BAC PACK

• TEAM
  • Members
  • Notebooks
  • Acknowledgements
• PROJECT
  • Overview
  • Digital Component
  • Wetlab Component
  • Background
  • Hardware
• OUTREACH
  • Practices
  • Methodology
  • Collaboration
• MEDAL FULFILLMENT

BACPACK OVERVIEW

  BacPack For New Frontiers is an interactive exhibit that makes use of key human computer interaction concepts to introduce users to core synthetic biology concepts. Featuring both a digital and a wet-lab component, the exhibit’s aim is to provide a collaborative bio-tinkering platform for non-scientists that will foster learning of the applications and syntax of biological design. This digital component of the exhibit uses powerful multitouch surfaces that serve as makerspaces for users to digitally engineer and test bacteria that are helpful for extreme environments such as Mars, Antarctica, and the Deep Sea. The wet-lab component complements to the experience by providing visitors with the opportunity to create colorful representations of the bacteria they created virtually. This project aims to design, prototype, and evaluate a new interactive museum exhibit that engages visitors in a bio-design activity while facilitating learning of bio design concepts and skills. The goal is to create a novel bio-tinkering platform designed for non-scientists to foster skills for invention and innovation.

Advantages of Virtual Biology

  Despite the richness of biology as the focus for open ended play and exploration (full of complexity, engaging phenomena, personal relevance, and direct application to daily experiences), the success of a “bio-maker space” brings the goals of tinkering tools (tangible, responsive, and open ended) and the confounders of biology tools (invisible/unintuitive, slow, and prescriptive) into direct conflict. Though authentic tangibles are ideal, virtual augmentation is often necessary to bring the time and size scales into the range of a human play session. Projects that combine digital and tangible affordances to create expressive parts are able to bridge time and size scales to simplify the design activity as well as integrate into collaborative virtual environments where complex interactivity can occur, emergent properties can arise, and creations can live or die depending on design.

Demo Video

Learning Goals

To clearly define the teaching aims of our project, we divided the targeted user population by age, and established the concepts we wish the project to convey to each age group.

8-12 Years Old

• Life has created parts for survival that can be combined in different ways.
• Bacteria can be engineered to use these parts.
• Those parts can be designed and remixed to address critical problems that the world faces.

12-16 Years Old

• Learn the basis of the design-build-test process and evaluating the design.
• Biological parts are pieces of DNA that can be found in the real world, in the lab, and in the iGEM competition!
• We can build on previous work to develop new organisms.

12-16 Years Old

• Bacteria can act as sensors and logic in addition to microfactories for production.
• Get acquainted with the basic syntax and terminology of SynBio design, e.g. understanding the concept of BioBricks, plasmids, etc.
• Introduce iGEM as a resource: you can be a synthetic biologist!