Team:The Tech Museum/Summary

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<p><b>Methods and Approach</b><br>
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<p><b>For a general audience</b></p>
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Evaluation of approach<br>
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<p>The Tech Museum of Innovation is a science and technology center located in San Jose, California. Our mission is to inspire the innovator in everyone! This year, we are trying to do just that with synthetic biology through our participation in iGEM!</p>
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The general approach we took to tackle our project question was to try to develop an interactive exhibit in which visitors are involved in both making and analyzing multi-colored bacteria. Overall, this approach allowed us to effectively answer our overarching question.  We successfully produced a fully functioning and very promising first prototype of a hands-on exhibit that engages the public in a synthetic biology experience.</p>
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<p>This is the first time a museum has entered the iGEM competition. We are excited to prototype new ways in which we, as an institution, can offer novel activities to excite and educate our community. Therefore, the starting goal of our project was to create an interactive museum exhibit to engage the public in synthetic biology. Can we promote public interest in and understanding of synthetic biology through a hands-on engineering of bacteria and data collection experience?</p>
 +
 +
<p>Importantly, we want to allow people of all ages and with no biology background to partake in the activity and become part of our museum iGEM team. To tackle these goals, we developed an interactive activity where visitors are involved in both making and analyzing multi-colored bacteria.</p>
 +
 +
<p>The first step towards creating this exhibit was to build the necessary tools. This included both biological tools as well as software ones.</p>
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<p>We successfully randomized bacteria colony color with our tri-color plasmid pools. Additionally, we were able to optimize the transformation conditions of bacteria with this plasmid pool to easily incorporate this new tools into the current museum wetlab experience. Additionally, the software we created could easily be used by museum visitors to quantify bacteria colony number and color. We were able to generate and have visitors add to an aggregate data set showing the frequency distribution of hues generated. Visitors responded positively to this experience of seeing how their data contributed to and modified the group data. Overall, people thought that the fluorescent multi-colored bacteria were very interesting and understood the basic concepts of how they were made and their contribution to our iGEM team</p>
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<p>On the biology side, we had to design and build the DNA instructions for making rainbow colored bacteria. To do this, we created a ‘soup’ of many different circular pieces of DNA (called plasmids). Each plasmid contains the genes that make fluorescent red, yellow, and blue color proteins. To each of these color genes, we randomly attached another piece of DNA that controls how much color protein is made (called promoters). We used a set of nine promoters with varying strengths: some make a lot of color protein while others make very little. This design strategy should randomize the relative levels of red, yellow, and blue produced by each unique piece of DNA. When these plasmids are individually inserted into bacteria, the final bacterial colony hue should represent a particular combination of color protein concentrations. This is similar to how an RGB computer screen operates. Thus, we are effectively creating bacterial ‘pixels!’ </p>
 +
 +
<p>Biology, however, is not quite as straightforward as an LED, since we are dealing with living things. DNA instructions can be read or interpreted differently in different biological contexts. And, this can sometimes dramatically modify the output of those instructions. So, although we designed a pool of plasmids that should be capable of making close to 750 different colors, does this actually happen? Do some promoter-color combinations always fail? Do others dominate? Are there colony hues that are never seen? Seen repeatedly?</p>
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<p>One important aspect of our project was that we wanted to allow people of all ages and with no biology background to participate and actually become part of our museum iGEM team. The final design of our project successfully did that. More than 60 experiments were run on the museum floor with visitors. These visitors ranged in age from as young as 5 years old to adults. Everyone was able to participate and complete the activities, which was a major achievement. These different ages, they likely got different levels of understanding out of their experience. The smallest kids mostly just liked the glowing colors, and the adults were curious to get deeper explanations about the biology underlying the generation of random bacteria colors. </p>
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<p>To help us answer these questions, we created another set of tools on the software side of things. We developed software to image, analyze, quantify the multi-colored bacteria colonies produced by our plasmid pools. This software combines imaging and computer vision strategies to detect and analyze bacteria colonies on a petri dish. The color results from each plate being analyzed are dynamically displayed on the screen, as are other fun statistics like the rare bacteria colors discovered by each visitor and the names of those colors!</p>
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<p><b>Advantages and limitations of method:</b><br>
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<p>Next, we integrated these new tool into a physical exhibit to create a hands-on synthetic biology experience. Museum visitors contribute to our project at two different stages. First, they insert the DNA instructions for making random colors into bacteria and grow them. This results in a rainbow of bacteria growing their plate! Hundreds of different colors are potentially possible. Then, they use our software tools at the ‘bacteria photobooth’ station to analyze the colony colors on plates from previous days.</p>
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Advantages include: <br>
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Ease of use, even small kids can participate <br>
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Visual appeal for all audiences<br>
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Ability to integrate this directly into established museum wetlab, which we know works and visitors love<br>
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Limitations include: <br>
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Only one visitor can participate at a time, so kids get impatient<br>
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Software is still needs some debugging, speed<br>
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Currently, explanation of underlying biology is very minimal and simplistic. This works for kids, but need more for older kids and adults.<br>
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Scanning station could be more interactive, again, mostly for older visitors who want to feel like they did more than just put the plate in the imaging booth. </p>
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<p><b>Management of Limitations:</b><br>
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<p>When a visitor finishes analyzing their plate, a large-scale dynamic visualization showing our team’s collective color data is updated in real time. This allows people to appreciate their personal contribution to our iGEM project and see how their data fits into the groups as a whole. Thus, any museum visitor who wants can become a citizen scientist and help us discover bacteria colors. Over time, our aggregate results will give insight into the variety and frequency bacteria colors that are produced by the pools of DNA that we built.</p>
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awesomness</p>
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<p><b>Visitor Feedback and Impacts on Project</b><br>
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<p>We spent several weeks on the museum floor engaging visitors with evolving prototypes of our hands-on exhibit. These interactions provided us with valuable feedback from users about their experience and helped us make both design and content improvements.</p>
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As part of our approach, we wanted to employ an iterative design process based on the acquisition and incorporation of user feedback. Thus, we spent several weeks on the museum floor engaging a diverse visitors with evolving prototypes our hands-on exhibit station. This time allowed us to get immediate feedback from visitors about their experience with the activity, which was very valuable.</p>
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<p>Visitor feedback was collected in two ways, mostly depending on the age of the participant and amount of time they had. Adult participants were asked to fill out a short feedback survey to give us insight into the most successful or weakest parts of the activity and whether they had actually learned anything. Below is the feedback form used.</p>
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<p>Altogether, our iGEM team of museum visitors analyzed a total of 2674 colonies of bacteria on 61 different petri dishes. Together, we found a total of 324 unique colors!</p>
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<p><b>Feedback Form</b>
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<p>We hope to continue using our iGEM project as a vehicle for exposing people to the excitement and power of synthetic biology. </p>
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Did you enjoy the activity?                                                                                Yes / No <br>
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Do you understand how the colored bacteria were made?                        Yes / No <br>
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Would you like to learn more about engineering bacteria?                        Yes / No <br>
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Favorite part? Least favorite part?<br>
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How could we improve the activity?<br>
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If you could put any DNA into bacteria, what would you make them do?<br> 
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Thanks for your feedback! It helps us develop better museum experiences!!</p>
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<p>We took a different approach with young children, who make up a majority of the museum’s visitors. For them, a short verbal feedback session was done after completion of the bacteria photobooth station. Again, we focused on figuring out their enjoyment of the activity, what they learned, what they liked, and what they wished had been part of the activity.</p>
 
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<p>Whenever possible, visitor feedback was immediately incorporated into our prototyping. This included things like reworking the introduction to our photobooth station. Our very first prototype had a limited introduction with dense directions. After getting feedback from visitors, we created a new, more step-wise introduction that contained a clearer explanation of the underlying biology. This design was a far more effective, and one that we continued to make minor tweaks to based evolving input from participants. Based on participant input, the frontend of the Rainbow Reader software for color analysis was also modified from its initial look to be much more simple and visually appealing.</p>
 
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<p>Additionally, we received valuable feedback about possible large scale changes or conceptual additions that visitor felt would improve the exhibit. Visitors thought that the photobooth station could be improved by making the colored bacteria colonies on the Rainbow Reader plate image screen touch sensitive. This feature would allow visitors to personally explore all of their colors and data before computer vision analysis of the plate was performed. We hope to incorporate this great idea into future versions of our scanning software. Adults visitors also often commented that the exhibit made them interested to know where they could learn more about engineering bacteria. This depth of information does not exist in our current activity, but we hope to add in access to that information in future prototypes. The exhibit could be extended to include supplemental activities to allow people to further explore more complex synthetic biology concepts after we spark their curiosity.</p>
 
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<p><b>Beyond the bench: Social Justice </b><br>
 
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Addressing gender, economic background and age diversity<br>
 
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The Tech’s approach to interactive exhibits is a shift from the more traditional learning outcome goals. Our top priority is the development of skills and confidence with our exhibition topics and we highly value design challenge based interactive exhibits. We take this approach with our exhibit prototyping process as well and believe that ideation, iteration, and evaluation, should begin at the research phase.</p>
 
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<p>Our community has one of the highest levels of diversity in the US, both racially and economically. This unique context allows and obligates us to incorporate social justice issues into our prototyping methods. Along with the well studied disparities balance with gender and economic background in science and engineering fields, we also target age in our prototype evaluation. By emphasizing hands on, iterative goals over content, we can invite adults to participate more in the activities, either alone or with their children.</p>
 
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<p>The Tech Museum of Innovation’s primary mission is to inspire a new generation of innovators with the confidence and skills to create technologies that benefit humanity. Technological change is tightly connected to social change, and an equitable society is necessary for pervasive technological change. By creating spaces where our community can learn to think and to speak in the language of science and engineering, especially those marginalized by traditional models, we are able to give our visitors stronger agency to improve society.</p>
 
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<p>Even at it’s simplest, the engineering of DNA requires a shift in perspective from what most of our visitors are routinely familiar with. The go-to metaphor of patchwork husbandry, putting a chunk of one animal onto another and getting something like a giraffe with a trunk, belies the fundamental nature of DNA. When speaking even very simply about bacteria, vocabulary like “plasmid” is useful and raises the question of what the optimum level of content should be attempted.</p>
 
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<p>Differential responses between demographic groups are a crucial focus in designing exhibit prototypes that may skew the interest of one group over another. Our method of many sessions of quick, low fidelity props, images, and text can spur new ideas and answer questions, but can be confounded by the diversity of test groups and subtle differences between test sessions. At a design level it seems obvious to track all measures of test groups, but in practice, aggregating small amounts of test data to pick one direction over another is common practice.</p>
 
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<p>Two common approaches at The Tech is relevant exhibit case studies and user centered design. The ultimate goal of both is to determine what visitors will naturally be drawn to and engage with in Synthetic Biology.</p>
 
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<p>Looking back to previous exhibitions, our Social Robots had a similar issue with gender skewing. When different types of robot-based assembly activity prototypes were created, they often had wheels as a means of movement. This subtle signaling that it was a “car” or “tank” seemed to draw more males over females. When animal-based robots with limbs and faces were later introduced, that skew shifted back to more gender neutral. With that learning, the direction of the entire robotics exhibition began to shift toward human-robot social topics and, in the end, a more modern and thought provoking perspective.</p>
 
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<p>The second methodology we employed was user centered design, where interviews with visitors  take place about not only the topic, but their own needs and limitations is the focus. In our polling, differences between economic backgrounds were most apparent, particularly in whether the visitor (students in this case) were able to visit with family or as a larger school group.</p>
 
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Latest revision as of 20:36, 17 October 2014

Home Team Project Notebook Community Engagement Attributions

Executive Summary

For a general audience

The Tech Museum of Innovation is a science and technology center located in San Jose, California. Our mission is to inspire the innovator in everyone! This year, we are trying to do just that with synthetic biology through our participation in iGEM!

This is the first time a museum has entered the iGEM competition. We are excited to prototype new ways in which we, as an institution, can offer novel activities to excite and educate our community. Therefore, the starting goal of our project was to create an interactive museum exhibit to engage the public in synthetic biology. Can we promote public interest in and understanding of synthetic biology through a hands-on engineering of bacteria and data collection experience?

Importantly, we want to allow people of all ages and with no biology background to partake in the activity and become part of our museum iGEM team. To tackle these goals, we developed an interactive activity where visitors are involved in both making and analyzing multi-colored bacteria.

The first step towards creating this exhibit was to build the necessary tools. This included both biological tools as well as software ones.

On the biology side, we had to design and build the DNA instructions for making rainbow colored bacteria. To do this, we created a ‘soup’ of many different circular pieces of DNA (called plasmids). Each plasmid contains the genes that make fluorescent red, yellow, and blue color proteins. To each of these color genes, we randomly attached another piece of DNA that controls how much color protein is made (called promoters). We used a set of nine promoters with varying strengths: some make a lot of color protein while others make very little. This design strategy should randomize the relative levels of red, yellow, and blue produced by each unique piece of DNA. When these plasmids are individually inserted into bacteria, the final bacterial colony hue should represent a particular combination of color protein concentrations. This is similar to how an RGB computer screen operates. Thus, we are effectively creating bacterial ‘pixels!’

Biology, however, is not quite as straightforward as an LED, since we are dealing with living things. DNA instructions can be read or interpreted differently in different biological contexts. And, this can sometimes dramatically modify the output of those instructions. So, although we designed a pool of plasmids that should be capable of making close to 750 different colors, does this actually happen? Do some promoter-color combinations always fail? Do others dominate? Are there colony hues that are never seen? Seen repeatedly?

To help us answer these questions, we created another set of tools on the software side of things. We developed software to image, analyze, quantify the multi-colored bacteria colonies produced by our plasmid pools. This software combines imaging and computer vision strategies to detect and analyze bacteria colonies on a petri dish. The color results from each plate being analyzed are dynamically displayed on the screen, as are other fun statistics like the rare bacteria colors discovered by each visitor and the names of those colors!

Next, we integrated these new tool into a physical exhibit to create a hands-on synthetic biology experience. Museum visitors contribute to our project at two different stages. First, they insert the DNA instructions for making random colors into bacteria and grow them. This results in a rainbow of bacteria growing their plate! Hundreds of different colors are potentially possible. Then, they use our software tools at the ‘bacteria photobooth’ station to analyze the colony colors on plates from previous days.

When a visitor finishes analyzing their plate, a large-scale dynamic visualization showing our team’s collective color data is updated in real time. This allows people to appreciate their personal contribution to our iGEM project and see how their data fits into the groups as a whole. Thus, any museum visitor who wants can become a citizen scientist and help us discover bacteria colors. Over time, our aggregate results will give insight into the variety and frequency bacteria colors that are produced by the pools of DNA that we built.

We spent several weeks on the museum floor engaging visitors with evolving prototypes of our hands-on exhibit. These interactions provided us with valuable feedback from users about their experience and helped us make both design and content improvements.

Altogether, our iGEM team of museum visitors analyzed a total of 2674 colonies of bacteria on 61 different petri dishes. Together, we found a total of 324 unique colors!

We hope to continue using our iGEM project as a vehicle for exposing people to the excitement and power of synthetic biology.

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