Team:The Tech Museum/Community

Community Engagement

As a museum team, we were excited use our iGEM project to explore novel activities to excite and educate the public. Can we develop a museum exhibit that promotes public engagement in and understanding of synthetic biology through a hands-on engineering of bacteria and data collection experience?

With those goals in mind, an in important part of our development process was therefore prototyping. We actively tested out components of our exhibit with diverse audiences, from museum staff and educators to visitors, to get as much feedback as possible.

During the weeks that we had our exhibit on the museum floor doing data collection, we interacted with many people during their visits to the Tech Museum of Innovation. Altogether, we collected data with visitors from 61 individual experiments analyzed a total of 2674 colonies of bacteria. Many of these experiments were done with larger families or friend groups, so the actual number of people we directly interacted with was much larger.

In an effort to further engage the general public, inspire curiosity about synthetic biology, and expand general familiarity with the subject, we also created a video (on Home page) and written summary (link below) of our project aimed at a general audience.

Executive Summary

Methods and Approach

Evaluation of approach

The general approach we took to tackle our project question was to develop an interactive exhibit in which visitors both make and analyze multi-colored bacteria. In the end, this approach did allow us to effectively answer our main project question. We successfully produced a fully functioning and promising first prototype of an exhibit that engages the public in a hands-on synthetic biology experience!

From a biology perspective, the tri-color plasmid pools we designed for our project were effective at randomizing bacteria colony color. We were able to identify conditions such that we could efficiently transform bacteria with these plasmid pools using the existing visitor wetlab setup. This allows for the easy incorporation of our new tool into the already optimized visitor transformation experience and supporting staff workflow. Thus, we were able to create a ‘hands-on engineering of bacteria’ experience that is accessible to visitors as we had hoped.

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

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.

Advantages and limitations of method:
Advantages include:
Ease of use, even small kids can participate
Visual appeal for all audiences
Ability to integrate this directly into established museum wetlab, which we know works and visitors love
Limitations include:
Only one visitor can participate at a time, so kids get impatient
Software is still needs some debugging, speed
Currently, explanation of underlying biology is very minimal and simplistic. This works for kids, but need more for older kids and adults.
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.

Management of Limitations:
awesomness

Visitor Feedback and Impacts on Project
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beyond the bench: Social Justice
Addressing gender, economic background and age diversity