Team:IONIS Paris/Practices
Popularization of Biology
Introduction
Nowadays, Synthetic Biology is a real challenge in the scientific world, and we are all affected.
However, as a new field, concerns arise from population and the need to understand is becoming essential.
Aware of the need to communicate and share about Synthetic Biology, a new team have been created this year: IONIS Paris.
IONIS Paris team, gather students with different background in order to propose a new way to popularize biology and synthetic biology.
Scientists, computer engineers, scientist communication managers and designers have taken the challenge and propose a double project based on the popularization of science.
This will of IONIS iGEM to popularize Biology and Synthetic Biology gathers several proposals and projects which are presented in the following parts.
iGEM teams project
Explain your project in 1 minute
As this year the main goal of the IONIS iGEM team was to popularize Synthetic Biology, we have challenged other iGEM teams and asked them to create a one minute video introducing their project in the simplest way. As well, during the French meeting in July, we came with our camera and recorded the other French teams. Those videos were challenging for all teams, indeed, introducing its own project in only one minute is short. But also use simple worlds understood by everyone is challenging.
Popularization of Biology in elementary schools
New generation of biologists is coming!
According to IONIS iGEM main goals, the team has organized some introduction courses on DNA, the leaving organisms and as all the little students were really interested, the team also scheduled to perform a little experiment in order to extract banana's DNA. This event at the elementary school of Yvris (France), allowed not only an exchange of knowledge but also a human experience for our team.
The course started with a word cloud; our members wrote different words on the blackboard in order to underline a common point: all are living being. Then, during the course we have introduce the life three to the student. At the end of this class, we have performed an extraction of banana's DNA. All along the course, students were fascinated and interested.
Making a mobile application
BactMan's adventures
The mobile application that IONIS iGEM designed is available on all Android mobile phones.
We designed this application in order to communicate and popularize Synthetic Biology.
BactMan's Adventures is a mobile application popularizing science through educative mini-games around the life of a bacteria.
With it, you can discover key notions of biology through several mini-games, developed with an Open Source game engine to pursue iGEM's philosophy of openness and collaboration.
The application is developed for Android phones in Java, using the AndEngine game engine to build the different games available through the application.
The development process took care of devices specificities and incorporated local translation to aim at being available for the widest audience available.
Apart fron the mini-games, the application offers information about our team, the iGEM, and synthetic biology : introduction of iGEM and of the BioBricks, presentation of the IONIS iGEM team and of our Bioconsole project, glossary of technical terms...
As this mobile application represents a huge amount of intellectual, material and time implication of all of our team, and as we didn't realize all the mini-games we wanted to design, we want our mobile application to be transmitted and updated every year for the iGEM competition by the next IONIS iGEM teams.
BIO-CONSOLE
Our reality game using bacteria
APPLICATION
Bact'man, our hero
GAME OVER
Allowing the end of the game