Team:Edinburgh/HumanPractices/Education
EXPLANATION
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INTRODUCTION
This is the story of three children Michael,Wang and Saanvi, the story takes place at Koli island
ENCOUNTERING NEMO
With a casual encounter they meet a friendly fish named Nemo. After helping the kids retreiving their ball, Nemo ask the children for their help
GIFT FROM NEMO
The fishes of the bay are getting sicker and sicker due a mysterious disease. Then Nemo gives magical pieces of paper that will bring luck to the children and defeat the disease
TESTING
As suggested by Nemo to extract all the magic from the pieces of paper,the children need to submerge these into water
TALK WITH PARENTS
On contact with water the pieces of paper start to emit a powerful light! Instinctively the children bring the magic piece of paper to the attention of their parents that intrigued by the magical reaction with water decide to investigate.
ENDING
After the parents contacted their local authorities and their water providers,
EDUCATIONAL KIT
The biosesensor that we produced could be easily be used as an educational kit to teach environmental issues as well as principles of synthetic biology/biology to middle-schoolers. In that regard we followed the pioneering work layed down by the "BioBits TM Bright: A fluorescent synthetic biology education kit" to design a potential educational kit
Educational biology kit can be designed base on our project. Innovative experiments using freeze-dried cell-free extracts in classrooms and other occasions with poor resource provided can be conducted. It requires no culture of bacteria, no sophisticated laboratory equipment, and involves no health problems. By creating an online database, teachers and students can design experiments together and share their results.
This year was not possible for us to engage in direct activities with children.
Even if a physical version of the biosensor was not available during the year (the CODIV19 pandemic forced the team to physically produce the biosensor between September and October in 3 weeks of lab work ) since the start of the pandemic the team decided to not engage in direct face-to-face activities with children due to safety and moral concerns
MOBILE GAME
We worked on a concept of mobile and location-based videogame where children equipped with our biosensor and a cellphone with Near-Infrared camera could gather environmental data while gathering points and special prizes. We tried to apply the principle of gamification to environmental monitoring and we ended with a concept that resembles location base games such as Pokemon GO and Ingress. For now, the videogame is in the development stage and only the basic mockup, storyline and artwork are completed. During pre-production, we received feedback and positive responses from people that had experiences in public mobilisation.
MINECRAFT WORLD
Knowing that the production of the mobile game was exceeding the length of the competition we decided to create a Minecraft world to present our results to a wider public and engage children between aged 10-15 years.
In our world, it is possible to go to a big treasure hunt or guided tour between molecules, pathogens, laboratories and flying structures.
The main structures are the E.Coli, the Coronavirus, the DNA double helix, the Arsenic molecule and our giant logo, we have also secondary structures such as labs, an aquarium, fountains, a giant stage whit functional logic gates.
Since the University of Nottingham also used Minecraft to make an interactive game we merged our world! Now it is possible to play both maps in a single Minecraft world
Lastly while designing the Minecraft world we tried to use principles of gamification and storytelling. (Roleplay, Puzzles, Points, Leaderboards)
