Team:The Tech Museum/Community

Community Engagement

As a museum team, we were excited to use our iGEM project to explore novel activities that can excite and educate our community. We wanted to develop a hands-on synthetic biology experience for everyone!

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

Approach and Methods

Evaluation of approach

The underlying question driving our iGEM project was: 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? As detailed elsewhere, the general approach we took 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 successfully produced a fully functioning first prototype of an 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. Overall, people thought that the multi-colored fluorescent bacteria were very interesting and older participants understood the basic concepts of how they were made.

From a software perspective, we created apps that could easily be used by museum visitors to quantify bacteria colony number and color. Using these tools, we were able to generate a visitor-driven data set exploring the frequency and diversity of colony colors generated by our pool of fluorescent tri-color plasmids. Furthermore, visitors responded very positively to their experience at our bacteria photobooth station and to seeing how their plate data contributed to and modified the aggregate group data.

Another important goal of our iGEM project was to create an interactive exhibit that allowed people of all ages and with no biology background to become part of our team. This first prototype successfully did that! More than 60 experiments were run on the museum floor with visitors who ranged from 5-year-olds to adults. With direction, everyone was able to complete the activity and contribute to our collective data set, which was the goal. It was apparent that across such a large age range, there were vast differences in the amount of knowledge about the underlying biology that each person took away. The smallest kids were mostly just wowed by the glowing colors, while many adults were curious for deeper explanations than were directly incorporated into our exhibit. Figuring out how to engage across to this wide range of levels will be an interesting future challenge.

Advantages and limitations of method:

Advantages include:

• Ease of use: even small kids use the bacterial photobooth to contribute to our data
• Visually exciting: the appeal of color is fairly universal
• Can be integrated directly into our established museum wetlab: has already been optimized for effective transformation of bacteria by visitors and is a known museum favorite

Limitations include:

• Only one visitor can participate at a time: limits number of people who can participate and kids get impatient
• Explanation of underlying biology is very simplistic: helps kids understand, but not enough depth to satisfy the curiosity of older participants
• No interactive component during data analysis part of photobooth station: would be more engaging for older visitors to have this

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