Team:Wellesley TheTech/Project/Wetlab

Background: The Tech


Visitor Demographics


The Tech's community has one of the highest levels of diversity in the US, both racially and economically. We serve approximately 400,000 to 500,000 people each year, with most of those visitors falling into two categories: families and school groups. The majority, over 280,000, are familes containing children between the ages of 8 and 18. According to our annual visitor assessment, the average party size is 1.8 adults and 1.2 children. About 68% of visiting parties include children and the average age of these kids is 8.7. The second largest audience is school groups. More than one in four museum guests -- or 120,000 of The Tech’s annual visitors -- are students attending as part of classroom field trips. These groups consist mostly of children ages 10 or older, and 60% are from low-income Title 1 schools.


Approach to Exhibits


The Tech’s approach to exhibits is a shift from the more traditional science education learning outcome goals. We highly value, and are experts in, design challenge learning based programs and interactive exhibits. The top priority of these experiences is not the content itself, but instead the development of skills and confidence with the exhibition topic. We aim to empower visitors to think innovatively and solve diverse problems. The Tech’s primary pedagogical approach is to engage participants in our innovation design process: We pose a challenge or invite participants to find their own “why” for engaging in the design process. We help participants imagine different possible solutions; create by building their solution or a model of their solution; test those solutions and then iterate to improve design results; reflect on what they learned and how their solution performed; and share those results with others.


BioDesign Exhibition


The Tech’s upcoming BioDesign exhibition (opening spring 2016!) will engage the public in interactive exhibits that spark imagination and confidence with the burgeoning fields of DIY biology, synthetic biology, and biodesign. It will engage the public in a combination of digital and real-life biological experiences that are both meaningful and personal. Importantly, the exhibition will deliver much more than just knowledge about these exciting subjects and cutting-edge technologies. It will be a place where people of all ages can personally create with biology. Visitors will be empowered to play, tinker, and design with the basic rules and building blocks of life. By demystify biodesign, we will help visitors build confidence in this dynamic field and gain new perspective to fuel creative problem‐solving in this space.

Importantly, we want to allow visitors to tinker with biology in the real world. Therefore, part of the exhibition space will be transformed into a working community biolab: The Biotinkering Workshop. In the same way that makerspaces are connecting people to electronics and mechanical engineering, we hope to make the rising world of DIY biology accessible to all. This ambitious space will house an array of biomaterials and tools to allow visitors to personally experiment in hands-on and open-ended ways with biology as a technology and form of creative expression. When possible, we hope to link some of these real world biolab activities to digital exhibits to augment and extend the visitor experience.


WETLAB COMPONENT


The goal of the wetlab component of BacPack is to connect the digital multitaction experience to a hands-on, lab-based one. In the digital activity visitors explore designing bacteria to have a variety of new, useful functions for helping humans survive in different extreme environments. In the wetlab activity visitors get try their hands at the same real-world process of engineering a bacteria to have a new property of their choosing.


Activity Design

Museum visitors were lead through a facilitated activity to transform bacteria. The tabletop graphic on our mobile lab was made to look like the digital Mars activity (left photo). Five different plasmids were chosen that uniquely change the physical appearance of E.coli: either color or bioluminescence. Each ‘color’ was made to represented an engineered bacteria function that can provide one of the five needs in BacPack’s Mars environment. Based on what resource they want to contribute to Mars, visitors started the activity by picking which DNA they wanted to use in their personal petri dish design area (middle photo). They are were then directed through the transformation process and discussion of the biology, the technology, and its implications by a facilitator. Their plates were left in a museum incubator to grow overnight. We imaged visitor plates two days later and visitors could see a photo of their grown ‘mars bacteria’ online (right photo).


Wet lab prototype 1 Wet lab prototype 2 Wet lab prototype 3


Plasmids

We used the following BioBricks from the iGEM distribution kit to visually represent the various kinds of engineered bacteria that could help provide the 5 resources needed on Mars:



Mobile Lab Transformation Station

The standard laboratory E.coli transformation procedure was streamlined and optimized to make is readily accessible to walk-up museum visitors of all ages and skill levels (see video below). Briefly, visitors use transfer pipettes to add 100ul of their chosen DNA in CaCl2 to 20ul of competent E.coli. This is followed by a 30 sec incubation on ice and a 40 sec heat shock. Finally, the bacteria are plated out onto Chloramphenicol LB plates, spread, and placed in an incubator for overnight growth. With facilitation, every group that started the activity during out prototyping sessions on the museum floor was able to successfully complete all of the transformation steps. As further proof of their success, every visitor-made plate, even the ones done by very young kids, grew numerous colorful colonies.




Safety


The weltlab side of Bac Pack posed limited safety risks. We did not employ any dangerous organisms or reagents. The plasmids used were well-characterized ones from the iGEM distribution kit and transformations were done using E.coli. All wetlab work and prototyping with visitors on the floor adhered to standard BSL1 biosafety guidelines. This includes adequate training and oversight for techniques and equipment, proper containment, cleanup and disposal of chemicals, biological reagents and hazardous waste, appropriate use of PPE and adherence to standard microbiological practices.