Overview
This year, our project is related to the Alzheimer's disease (AD). In order to let more people know about the background and knowledge of AD, iBowu_China put great effort in education activities: we held a biology art exhibition, designed and drew a bio-doodle, arranged specific role-play game to publicize our project. All the activities were well organized and received great feedback.
In each part, we would introduce our work in the following four steps:
Murder Mystery Game
1. Project proposal
In this project of Education and Science Communication, we are aiming to let more people learn about Alzheimer's disease (AD). We didn't want to stick to the traditional ways of education. From our perspective, biology is not at all boring and abstruse, and we are certain our project can make it fun for all. We boldly adopted the innovative educational method of the Murder Mystery Game.
Murder mystery games are a genre of party games where one of the players is playing a secret criminal, while the other players must reveal his identity through on-card clues and in-person communications. Player tasks are guided by a scripted game plan, but the plan allows a lot of freedom in players’ actions. In some styles of game, the criminal is aware of his identity and targets, while in other styles the criminal only discovers his task with progression of the game plan, along with the other participants. Murder mystery games often involve the actual 'murders' of guests throughout the game, or commence with a 'death' and have the rest of the time devoted to investigation.
In 2021, the size of China's Murder Mystery Game is about 11.74 billion yuan. It is expected that the size of the Murder Mystery Game industry will reach about 23.89 billion yuan in 2022, and it is still promising in the future. In many middle to high school students' daily life, murder mystery game has become one of the main entertaining activity, there are murder mystery stories everywhere, with all kinds of different topics. There are TV shows about murder mystery games, in which you get to see actors, singers, and idols play those murder mystery games. On vacation days, hundreds and thousands of students went to play the murder mystery games. All of these shows that murder mystery games already became the priority of fun and relax activity that students and adults choose to experience. All of my friends love murder mystery games, moste students at the age of 15-18 are all big fan of murder mystery games in China. Students in our school formed a small group named Island, which in the Brain Studio community wants to stimulate players' interest in molecular biology through playwriting, a form of entertainment popular with young people, and learn about biology through reasoning and researching stories in a unconventional way.
"No Body No Case" intended to promote the studio's iGEM team iBowu-China's AD treatment project. The story revolves around a rich man who suffers from the sudden onset of Alzheimer's disease. He tries to understand the clinical manifestations, causes, and treatments of Alzheimer's disease in the process of clearing the fog and exploring the truth and finally tries to reach a "perfect ending" based on testimony and reasoning. Also, the Murder Mystery Game often do not include this kind of biological topics, so this is another kind of renovation.
2.Our target population:
Our game is intentionally designed specially, in most murder mystery games, there is a victim, and the victim is usually killed, the player's job was to find the killer. But, based on the fact that our goal is to talk about Alzheimer's disease, and to make people know more about this disease, to educate, we get rid of the "killing" part. In our game, there is still a victim, but the victim is not killed, the players still have to find a "murderer", which I will leave the mystery for you to solve on your own. We lower the level of difficulty and the time that takes to finish our game has been reduced to 2 hours, which means players can experience the whole script and still not be much time consuming, so we can welcome more players that are willing to try. Our game is suitable for all player that has basic reasoning ability, but not players under the age of 10 because these children are too lack patience and the ability to reason, which would harm the gaming experience. If you are interested in this topic, you are welcome to give it a try!
3.What did we do:
[Design]
We finished writing by mid-September and published the first edition of the publicity article by mid-August. We have obtained collaboration from the Murder Mystery Game Club of Beijing Normal University Experimental International Department. It is expected that the Role-play Game will be distributed on campus for trial release and to obtain improvement suggestions.
Here shows some of the script: Early autumn bleak, the quiet villa The rich get dotty, who is guilty? One marriage, double animosity Three old friends, with four anxiety Alzheimer, which erased the memories Shall we end, our ancient malignity Seven dusty enmity
Police recently received a report that Su Zhiwen, a 46-year-old millionaire, had been behaving strangely in his mountain villa since September 27. He was too excited about people around him, had confusing language, could not communicate, and often tried to hurt himself and his family. His family was very worried, fearing that rivals or conspirators were trying to do him harm. The police thought the incident strange, so they sent a detective to investigate and a biologist to assist.
According to the analysis of biologists, the rich should be suffering from Alzheimer's disease (Alzheimer's disease), but Alzheimer's disease should be the onset of people over 60 years old, and it should be artificially induced (beta-amyloid protein deposition). There were no surveillance cameras installed, the villa was so remote that the official database could not be used, and there were no signs of forced damage around the villa. Detectives found that there were no fingerprints or blood stains left for DNA tests because the people in the villa had lived there for a long time and no cameras were installed. The police eventually identified seven suspects. There are two children of the rich, probably competing for an inheritance; The tycoon's ex-wife, who may have colluded with a rival to seek revenge on the tycoon; The current wife, who may have killed her husband for money; The maid in the home of the rich, two people are said to often have contradictions during the work; The husband's housekeeper, who lives in the villa with the maid, may avenge his wife; Or it could be the strong competition of the rich... For a moment, a cloud of suspicion pressed over the villa, who is the murderer?
[Effort]
We had done a lot of effort into this project to make our script and art design closer to perfect. We had written approximately 10 drafts of the script, which cost a total word to nearly 150,000. And our art design group drew 4 drafts of every 7 characters' head portrait, 1 map, 14 clue cards, and a cover. For six months, all the members of our team have been trial and error the whole process because we are all the first time to participate in the making of a whole new Murder Mystery Game. Half of the members of our team, 11 people, worked nights and days just to show the best of it to the player and make people learn without feeling struggled. Long and lonely nights had passed written them, but when we saw the printed game box on our own, and the broad smiles on the faces of people who were playing, we felt satisfied and that all these hard works had paid off.
[Investigation]
We further designed a questionnaire to investigate whether students are interested in our Murder Mystery Game.
In a total of 113 valid questionnaires, the ratio of male to female was 1:2 to conduct the intention survey of Alzheimer's disease Murder Mystery Game questionnaire among the people from junior high school to graduate school, of which 15.4% were junior high school students and 60.03% were senior high school students. College and graduate students accounted for 15.93. Most of them (64.6%) mastered biology at the high school level, 22.12% mastered biology at the middle school level, and the rest mastered biology at the university level or above. However, most of them were interested in biology in the ordinary or love, without very negative emotions. It can be seen from this that the audience of our Murder Mystery Game is not very good at biology, and they are not studying biology, but they do not hate it at the same time. This is also the premise of our simple science popularization through the Murder Mystery Game.
The reason why we choose this method is that most of the respondents (61.06%) have been exposed to Murder Mystery Game, and most of them (65.22%) have several times of experiences with Murder Mystery Game, which is also very popular among young people, and up to 79.55% of them are very willing to try this novel form of Murder Mystery Game.
The script we wrote this time was to publicize our project and conduct some science popularization related to Alzheimer's disease. It was found that most people had only searched some materials and had no in-depth understanding. So we also investigated what people wanted to know about it, and found that most people wanted to know about the causes, treatments, and clinical manifestations of the disease, so these are also introduced in our script.
[Promotion]
Next, we set some promotion plans to get more audience.
Our Murder Mystery Game is available at the biology show in 798 Art Gallery in early October.
We contact with short video application Murder Mystery Game anchor promotion, which can be promoted to small cities and international forms, and about 3-4 hours can play.
To collect feedback results, we use a questionnaire to collect experience (quizzes), offline interviews, and random questions to test the degree of knowledge absorption.
In the future, we plan to sell the script to the Murder Mystery Game company for professional operation and design the web version of the small program for online promotion. The design artists, print and produce the physical version of the Murder Mystery Game box, sold on the software, priced at 250 yuan/copy.
4.The feedback we got:
The way we did it was to use the Murder Mystery Game’s mechanical freedom of the script itself, which meant that we had to answer some questions about Alzheimer's disease (which we learned during reading the script) before we could get the reasoning clues, and if we got the answers right, we could get the clues. In this way, the introduction of biological knowledge into a relaxed game will not be too boring for everyone, and since it is a requirement of the game, the player will be forced to memorize it.
5.Credits
General director: Xie Sarah Peiyuan, Liu Cindy Yingxin. Draft: Xie Sarah Peiyuan, Liu Cindy Yingxin. Main writer: Xie Sarah Peiyuan, Liu Cindy Yingxin. Reasearch: Xie Sarah Peiyuan, Liu Cindy Yingxin. Art designer: Chen Siru, Chen Nick Liangxi, Kamiya Takumi, Xie Sarah Peiyuan, Liu Cindy Yingxin. Propaganda: Xing Tinac Yue, Xie Sarah Peiyuan, Liu Cindy Yingxin, Chen Haber Hanpeng, Huang Audrey Ruiyan. Wiki editing: Xie Sarah Peiyuan, Liu Cindy Yingxin. Team: Xie Sarah Peiyuan, Liu Cindy Yingxin, Chen Haber Hanpeng, Huang Audrey Ruiyan, Yu Gloria Shiqi, Xing Tinac Yue, Chen Siru, Chen Nick Liangxi, Kamiya Takumi, Zhao Cindy Xinyi, Han Yanbo.
6.Summary
We have studied excellent iGEM education programs and found that there is no similar education method that combines educational knowledge and games. The common ones are reading books and picture books, which can only be read and looked at. We combined a new popular game in China, unprecedented, for iGEM education publicity to open up new ideas. We welcome all iGEM teams to get new ideas, contact us, communicate and interact with us, and continue to promote our projects even after the iGEM season is over.
Biology Art Exhibition
1. What we want to do:
Biology is a science full of art; it could magically combine science and aesthetics. Walking outside, the scene of harmonious coexistence of various creatures reflects the beauty of nature. The cute birds and kittens bring us much happiness. In microbiology laboratories, proteins in cells are colored with different dyes to create beautiful patterns. A petri dish in a bacterial culture experiment can become a drawing board for artistic creation. As long as we observe, we can all find beautiful creatures in nature and discover the art of biology.
In order to promote the popularization of biology and to let more people pay attention to the beautiful phenomenon in biology, we held this biology art exhibition.
2. What did we do:
After brainstorming, our team members and the curators of the exhibition decided that we would hold a biology art exhibition focusing on the . We quickly decided on the theme and title of the exhibition -- A guide to escaping from the three-dimensional world. We planned to divide the exhibition into two parts, one is biology and aesthetics, and the other is related to AD. After completing the planning, we collected photos, videos, and other materials from classmates and parents around us. Whether it was a cute kitten we met on the road, a blooming flower, or a beautiful experiment result in the laboratory, all of them could provide materials for the biology art exhibition. We also encourage participants to write some words for their materials, which can record the mood when taking photos. These materials will become a good memory, and we will summarize and organize these materials. In the third step, the team members came to 798 (the concentration area of the Beijing Art exhibition) for investigation and determined the time and place of holding our art exhibition. Finally, we used the WeChat official account, website, and other approaches to attract more people to visit our biological art exhibition.
3. The feedback
We are still positively receiving all kinds of feedback, and we look forward to our biology art exhibition going to other cities and countries to show more people the charm of biology.
4.Week of the Exhibition Event: INTO THE DIMENSIONLESS
The "INTO THE DIMENSIONLESS" Earth Life Art Exhibition opens at the Beijing Enjoy-Art Museum on 6 October 2022.
A total of 109 creators have been invited to work in this exhibition, featuring artworks in different media such as painting, installation, and video, exploring the mysteries of life from multiple perspectives around topics such as science, genetics and the environment. When we look back at the long history of mankind from the dimension of one species, we see the countless lives spent in the pursuit of truth and meaning, and the traces of truth and knowledge spreading outwards across the long river of time and space.
The exhibition will be on display from the 5th to the 10th. 798 is located in a very busy traffic area of Beijing, so countless people come to see this exhibition every day.
In addition, on 7 October 2022, from 2pm to 6pm, we will present the "Synthetic Biology Carnival", a public education event where teams such as Keystone, BIT, THU, etc. will present their projects and explain about synthetic biology to the audience.
BioDoodle Project
An interactive, educative, transcending coloring book that sparks the light of interest for active learners.
Project aim:
By creating this interactive coloring book and mainly distributing it in China, we want to increase the general population’s exposure to Synthetic Biology in a fun but informative manner, and raise people’s interests in this field, in the hope of aggrandizing the team of young Syn Bio lovers and help foster their interests for their future careers.
How our Target Audience is considered into the design:
1.1 Statement of Target Audience
BioDoodle 2.0 is designed to target our audience group as students in the primary and middle school sectors. Therefore, we paid attention to every aspect and details of the book to make sure our product is considerate for the targeted range of students. In order to do so, we provided vocabulary pages with terms and definitions after each concept we introduce. Our writers used relatively more comprehensible and straight-forward tone and diction in body paragraphs of the content. We also used different fonts of words and various eye-catching colors in illustrations to grab the attention of the readers, who, like many primary school students, are easily distracted from tasks like reading a book sedentarily.
1.2: A larger and more general audience group
Although we are facing primarily to primary and middle schoolers, we welcome everyone to dive into the fascinating world of synthetic biology with our BioDoodle 2.0 version. As the majority of members of our team are located in Che language set up of this educational coloring book is primarily English, with a few Chinese words noted to act as explanations for complex concepts.
1.3: A larger and more general audience group
Although we are facing primarily to primary and middle schoolers, we welcome everyone to dive into the fascinating world of synthetic biology with our BioDoodle 2.0 version. As the majority of members of our team are located in Che language set up of this educational coloring book is primarily English, with a few Chinese words noted to act as explanations for complex concepts.
1.4: An interactive mode of learning
In BioDoodle 2.0, illustrations of concepts, such as cell organelles, are given in colored versions and versions with contour lines only, all along with literal explanations of their function and structure. The illustrations with contour lines are there to offer an opportunity for students to do hands-on drawing and coloring inside the contour lines in the process of understanding and learning concepts in a way that reinforces their memories on them. Meanwhile, this is a rewarding activity after which they would feel a sense of accomplishment, thereby increasing their interest to continue reading and even exploring more about biology and synthetic biology beyond this book. Moreover, the act of coloring is also therapeutic for children and adolescents, especially when certain individuals have no outlet for unpleasant or confusing emotions. This offers inclusivity and a calming media for children who might accumulated stress throughout their days of hard work at school.
1.5: Improvement made based on last year’s survey
iBowu-China 2021 conducted a survey from which the answers illuminated our ideas of improvement in this year’s design. We pulled out two important questions that are useful to our design this year. A large portion of the respondents asserted that visual materials is good for memorization and studying. Combining this with our research which suggested benefits of visual learning in the previous paragraphs, we decided to focus on giving a bountiful amount of images, visual demonstrations, and interactive spaces for the students to draw on themselves. In addition, approximately 65% of the respondents claim that they do not get any experiments or lab experiences in their school. These answers made us realize the our audience’s lack of knowledge about experiments and drove us into incorporating the some common apparatus used in biological experiments and the types of bacteria used in synthetic biology experiments. These could well supplement what the students normally get from their schools and provide them with a well-rounded knowledge base, allowing students interested in the fields of biology and synthetic biology to enter their next phase of learning.
used in synthetic biology laboratories. This gives the students a general idea about the appearances of devices in a lab.
Reference (1.3):
Hailey Van Braam, "10 Benefits of Coloring Pages for Kids' Psychology and Development," Color Psychology, https://www.colorpsychology.org/10-benefits-of-coloring-pages-for-kids-psychology-and-development/