Team:AshesiGhana/Education
Education & Science Communication
On this page, we explain what our game, Board-o-Bact, is, as well as our inspiration and how we hope it will achieve its intended purpose.
What is Board-o-Bact?
Board-o-Bact is a dice-based board game (and soon to be mobile game) that we created in order to help high-school children, especially in Africa, learn about the fundamentals of synthetic biology.
We realized that there doesn't seem to be much interest in iGEM and synthetic biology as a whole (evinced by the fact that only 3 African teams registered for the 2020 iGEM competition). Thus, we began to wonder if there was a fun and educative way we could introduce biology to audiences that have no prior biology education or knowledge. With the help of our PI, Board-o-Bact was born.
What inspired the idea of the game?
Wondering how to play? Keep reading and we'll show you!
The aim of the game is to degrade all your units of plastic within the shortest possible time.
Each player starts off with a token on the board, at the START square, and a set number of chips known as energy units (E for short). There is a default number of plastic units (say, 100) that each player starts with and needs to degrade.
There are six main cards that need to be collected during the game. However, before beginning to collect any of these cards, the player first needs to land on either the E. coli square or the Sulfolobus A. square to collect one unit of bacteria (i.e., one bacterium). These six cards are shown below, and players need to collect all six of them per bacterium.
At the Cloning Bay, once the player has collected all six cards, the promoter gene is placed into a plasmid (similar to what happens with bacterial cloning). The player hands in their plasmid and promoter cards and is given a cloning pass. This cloning pass serves a notice that the player has successfully passed through the Cloning Bay.
Once cloning is done, the player can successfully land on the Transformation Bay (if they roll the right number on the dice) to upgrade and activate their bacteria. The player hands in their low-level bacterium and receives a higher-level bacterium that can begin to degrade plastic once the player lands on start.
Landing on the Bacteria Growth square allows the user to double the amount of transformed bacteria they currently have. The more bacteria you have, the more plastic units you can degrade. In the plastic degradation process, one unit of energy is able to degrade one unit of plastic.
Some interesting things to note are that certain types of cards are specific to certain bacteria. As such, players would need to make sure that the cards they collect are applicable to their bacteria before they try to clone, transform, and grow.
There are also some fun squares, similar to Chance tiles on a Monopoly board, to keep the game engaging. One of such is the You've Got Mail tile. Upon landing here, players would receive random messages that could ask them to perform activities such as "Sorry! The amount of plastic you need to degrade has now doubled." or "The other players are in need. Share your energy units with them." or "Congratulations! Advance to START and begin degrading plastic".
These are some of the cards from the game.
PLASMID
Board-o-Bact card
RIBOSOME BONDING SITE
Board-o-Bact card
RESTRICTION ENZYME
Board-o-Bact card
TERMINATOR
Board-o-Bact card
PROMOTER
Board-o-Bact card
LIGASE
Board-o-Bact card
Our hope is that by playing this game, players will learn the basics of bacterial cloning and growth by knowing that all six cards (i.e. ligase, plasmid, promoter, ribosome bonding site, restriction enzyme, and terminator) need to be present before any form of cloninng or replication can take place. We also hope that this game piques their interest and causes them to want to learn more about synthetic biology and biology in general.