Wiki

Smartphone-friendly interface

The COVID-19 pandemic has definitely been a very steep learning curve, if nothing else, especially for students across the world. Teachers had to adapt to educating students through screens, and students had to make do with whatever resources they had available.

Particularly in developing countries like India, where the percentage of people that use desktops or laptops is very small compared to the percentage of people that use smartphones, most methods of remote learning failed to make the impact they wanted to. We took note of this issue and decided to make our wiki mobile-friendly. This not only helps the majority of people residing in tropical (and dengue-prone) countries access our wiki, but also accommodates the increasing number of people in developed countries that choose to use a handy smartphone over a bulky desktop or laptop. We aim to take our wiki to every corner of our country, and the world, with this smartphone-friendly feature, so that the benefits of our work can reach as many people as possible. The following is a graph that shows the number of smartphone vs desktop users in four tropical continents, including India.

Font considerations

The next thing that we looked at to make our wiki more inclusive was the font. ‘Poppins’ was our final choice. This is a manifold solution that allows us to help people with special needs consume our content. It follows the guidelines for making fonts dyslexia-friendly, with its sans serif typeface. Poppins is a monospace font which is easier on the eye for everyone, and we have refrained from italicising text or using entirely uppercase words to emphasise on points. We have also chosen to limit the number of fonts used on our wiki so as to ensure greater accessibility. Our choice of Poppins as the font used on our wiki gives us the advantage of making written communication easier on the eye for everyone.

Education and Outreach

STEM gender gap

We had decided to ensure that our outreach efforts were not restricted to certain select groups, but had a diverse audience and group of beneficiaries. While we reached out to students of different grades from various schools to spread awareness against dengue and inform them about synthetic biology, we noticed a very common, yet easily overlooked occurrence. Most of the classes that we were interacting with had a very small proportion of girl students. This made us realise that the gender gap in STEM fields can start from a very young age. Therefore, we connected with India’s oldest all-girls school that is run by Indians, Huzurpaga Girls High School. We met and talked to the very excited young women at Huzurpaga about synthetic biology, their dreams, and their hardships. We tried to encourage them to pursue whatever they want to, especially science, by teaching them about many incredible women scientists.

High-risk groups

We tried to target high-risk groups that are more likely to get infected with dengue fever.

We reached out to Samarthanam Trust for Disabled People, an orphanage and a home for distressed and disabled women in the city of Bangalore. Given that the funding for these establishments is measly, hygiene is often difficult to maintain despite the efforts of the caretakers. Access to healthcare is also limited, if present at all. We discussed our project with the residents, and listened to their experiences with dengue, learning about the tragedies they had braved. It was a deeply moving experience for us.

We left the institution with clothes for the residents and contacts of hospitals that would offer free medical facilities.

Diverse representation

We designed an activity book to help younger children connect with our project, featuring a group of four characters - Rohan, Aisha, Jogi, and Jane. This band of friends that protect our body from germs sport diverse names in an effort to ascertain that all our young readers can feel represented. Captain AbDEN has been given no pronouns or gender, in writing or illustration - both are left up to the readers.

Colourblind-friendly

In our fun and educational card game, we have used colourblind-friendly palettes to make sure that colour blindness does not prevent anyone from learning about plasmids while enjoying our game.

The activity book and game can be found at our Communications page. We have also included a black and white version of the game for cost-effective printing.

Language no bar

India is a land of many languages. Our constitution recognises 22 official languages and then, there are numerous variations of these languages. Even within our team, all 10 members can collectively speak roughly 8 to 9 languages. While preparing for our outreach activities, we planned such that a team member fluent in the local language of our audience was involved with the session. As our sessions took place in Pune, Hindi and Marathi were the language of choice. We reached out to kids at a vasthi (slum) to give them our activity books and explain the contents to them in Hindi, Marathi, and their own language called Banjara. For our human practices, we talked to the construction workers in Bangalore in Kannada.

We also created a survey in 5 different languages so as to increase our reach. The survey gave general information about dengue fever after asking a few simple questions about the disease.

Our anti-dengue pamphlet, which contains a list of easy-to-follow tips that would help reduce instances of dengue, was produced in 8 languages- English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, and Kannada - to broaden our reach across our country.

Our anti-dengue pamphlet is available to download here.

Anti-Dengue Pamphlet

However, we also kept in mind our international attendees while conducting webinars, and chose English as the means of communication.

We had collaborative meetings with the iGEM USP EEL team from Brazil. In one such meeting, USP EEL team members played the role of translators as we discussed dengue prevention measures with Professor Maulori Curio Cabral. This unusual meeting enabled both the teams to get a global perspective on dengue control policies.