Similarly to our Communication strategy, our aims in Education focused on several degrees of understanding. In this case, rather than focusing on people’s understanding of synthetic biology, we decided to tackle people’s understanding of education and how to implement it. As such, we created 3 key pieces of educational materials, targeted at people at different stages of their education:
Based off some of the discussions that arose during our Building with Biology session regarding safety in synthetic biology, we decided to create an online safety game. We initially thought of creating an online escape room where the main character would be a modified organisms trying to escape the lab, and as it attempted to do so, it would encounter the different safety precautions that exist in labs to prevent this.
However, we soon realised that from a player point of view this was a lose-lose situation: either they would be successful in escaping the lab, showing that in fact modified organisms could be released into the environment (not what we wanted to do!), or the player’s character would die, which is not a popular outcome amongst gamers.
It was then that we decided that it would perhaps be more interesting to create a Lab Safety Game, where players would learn about lab safety guidelines and proper waste disposal. The game was designed for high school students and undergraduates who had not yet had much lab experience – particularly relevant at the moment since the COVID-19 pandemic prevented many in-person teaching these past 3 years - , allowing them to come to terms with the basic safety rules and requirements before going into the lab.
In the early days of the game’s design, we consulted with a representative from Labster, a company dedicated to creating virtual reality lab experiences. We had originally thought that we could collaborate with them to design a game, however, time constraints did not allow us to do so: it would take at least 6 months to design a game with them and we only had 2 months of iGEM left.
And so, there was only one possible solution: we would create the game on by ourselves! Based off consultations with our Departmental Safety Officer, Brian O’Sullivan, we identified the most common safety guidelines that people forget about or don’t realise exist to include them in our game. We also discussed how different types of waste and spills should be disposed of safely, since this was a question that had arisen in our own wet lab experiences.
The game was built using CoSpaces, an online platform that allows you to create your own virtual classrooms. The process was laborious, with each room taking over 90 hours of work.
One of the beauties of the CoSpaces platform, is that it allows you to share your creations, not only with a select group of people, but also with the wider CoSpaces community. The game proved to be quite a success: within only 2 days of publishing on the website, the simulation had received over 1000 views. At the moment at which this is being written, the game has over 1335 views and growing.
Nevertheless, the website still has the drawback of not allowing people to post comments about their thoughts on the room. Therefore, in order to create a 2-way dialogue between us and the players and receive feedback about things to alter, we decided to do 2 things:
Another great feature of CoSpace is that is allows people to take the game and remake it, this means other people can build on the work we have done so far and make it their own. We can therefore only hope that the game will keep on gaining popularity and momentum within the site, allowing more people to come into contact with what working on a lab might look and feel like, allowing us to create that 2-way dialogue between us and the general public.