Team:Nottingham/Education

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Science education has been challenging this year due to the COVID-19 restrictions in place. Team Nottingham more than rose to the challenge though and adapted quickly to a new situation. We have produced an interactive educational Minecraft game for kids, a series of podcasts discussing not only our project, but also projects from other iGEM teams and a collection of Q&A videos tackling and explaining key areas of synthetic biology. Our educational resources engage a wide variety of people from kids with the Minecraft to teenagers and adults with the podcasts and Q&A videos. We also encouraged a flow of communication between the public and our team through our reddit page linked with the Minecraft project and through our social media, where we took questions from our followers and answered them in our podcasts. Find out more about our activities in science communication in the drop-down boxes below!



As part of our outreach and education this year, we decided to target the younger generation. We thought that we should create something that would allow us to introduce iGEM and synthetic biology to young students in schools, but that could also be re-used by teachers in the future. Unfortunately, almost all schools in the UK closed in March due to the 2020 pandemic and the status of their reopening remains unknown. Luckily, we had an ace up our sleeves with the Minecraft adventure map we have created. We plan to send an invitation to schools, so students can play this map in their classes. The great thing about the Minecraft adventure is that students can play and learn regardless of whether we can perform virtual or physical presentations. In addition, the map will be made available for anyone to download at any time, so it will not be limited to schools.

The aim of our Minecraft adventure map is to raise awareness of Neurodegenerative disease and encourage further reading into synthetic biology. It’s success centres around its story and its game.

Luke Barks and Kieran Bird crafted this adventure map from their imaginations, with Kieran building most of the map and Luke programming the Redstone.

The story needed to be interesting whilst also providing a natural route to explain areas of synthetic biology. However, once we started writing the story, we felt that we should focus on Neurodegenerative diseases, as these are the centre of our project. We came to this decision because this year the project is dry lab based and has a stronger focus on modelling than on synthetic biology.


Our approach for an interesting story line involved taking the player to a different dimension, where parts of history were forgotten due to meddling with the space time continuum. This resulted in residents of that world forgetting not only what synthetic biology is, but also all information surrounding Neurodegenerative diseases.


By creating a Minecraft adventure map, we hope to engage students and the general public in scientific thought, which is something that they may not get the chance to do otherwise. This can happen either because they are not interested in science, or because they are denied the opportunity to explore concepts further since they are not exposed to a top science setting. This is a problem that exists in some UK schools.


To enable discussion of the map and the biology that goes with it, we created a reddit page that we will monitor and respond to during the Summer and afterwards, should there be significant interest and availability from our team members. We have requested feedback from players to make quality of life improvements and/or adjust the delivery of the synthetic biology/neurodegenerative information. Any feedback about the adventure map we receive via email or our MS form will also be considered, and might influence any changes we make to the map to make it more playable or to allow the player to explore some areas in greater detail.

We achieved our main goal, which was to design a story and build the world around it. But by doing so we had to scale back the scope of the project. We learned to adapt our ideas to make the most of what we had available, without over stretching ourselves. Towards the end of the project, we discovered that our adventure map was something that had not been done before at our University, and that it created and additional interest in our project. Various parties realised that our adventure map could be used for more than just educational purposes. Since lockdown limited access to our various campus, some saw our platform as a good tool to allow new students to explore them remotely. Of course, this has the added benefit of exposing them to synthetic biology concepts and neurodegenerative diseases.


To get our map out to as many people as possible, we contacted local schools and YouTube personalities. As already mentioned, several people showed interest in the Minecraft adventure, including communication managers at our University.


Our target audience for this adventure map is primarily secondary school aged children and older. Nevertheless, anyone with an interest in synthetic biology or Minecraft will most likely enjoy our map and learn something. The map is designed to be played either in a school setting (possibly to replace a lesson or in tutor time as extra-curricular leaning), or just for fun, alone or with friends (with the teaching element taking a back seat from the main action and adventure, but remaining fully implemented into the story line). We did not restrict the storyline to require existing knowledge of science or neurodegenerative diseases, to include as many players as possible. The map is playable on consoles as well as Windows 10 PCs – it does not require expensive gaming equipment. The map is also available to download free of charge from our wiki and Dropbox for anyone across the World.


To complement our wiki and Minecraft, we designed and created a series of Q&A videos (also documented in our outreach section). These videos explain several concepts in a very clear way, so they will facilitate the understanding of our project. The idea is that any person that visits our wiki (after hearing a podcast or playing the Minecraft adventure map) can easily understand it and not be overwhelmed by the technical language. The Q&A videos are about a minute in length and describe key ideas and concepts, for instance "What is a neurodegenerative disease". Our original plan was to go to schools and interact with students, giving presentations and explaining science to them. The pandemic made this impossible, but we realised that we could use the Q&A videos to replace our presentations. The students have access to our videos and can easily learn without concerns regarding social distance



The unexpected global pandemic limited our options for outreach and collaboration. Our team struggled to find something that was not only engaging but also useful for future teams. After a lot of brainstorming, we finally came up with the perfect idea. A podcast!! Why? To begin with, a podcast is a useful tool to reach out to a wider audience (not limited to a specific location) and to collaborate with colleagues from all over the world. This is particularly valuable during these times of great uncertainty. Taking full advantage of these features, our team utilized the podcast forum to spread awareness about our project and synthetic biology, whilst also involving other teams. These teams were from different locations, from Denmark to Paris, and we talked not only about our projects but also other light-hearted content. Another reason for starting up the podcast was that it is an extremely effective, cheap, and easy way of outreach with minimal risk, since it can be done from the comfort of our own homes. Although these reasons were essential in the decision-making process, the main motivation behind starting a podcast was the idea that our discussions could deem useful for future teams. For instance, during the podcast, we often spoke about how we dealt with the setbacks of working remotely – he had to find ways to communicate effectively in order to maintain a high standard of work from a distance. This could be beneficial in the long run, since we suggest efficient and practical ways of working as a group without having to meet up in person every day. We also addressed how we dealt with the fact that we didn’t have access to the lab, how we conducted the whole project in a dry lab setting, and how we utilized online tools such as Snapgene to plan and simulate experiments. Additionally, we also believe that it is a way of outreach that does not need to stop with us and can be continued by future teams. One of the great features of our podcast is that we were able to involve members of the public in our discussion by posting a Q&A on our Instagram before the recording of our podcasts. This enabled an interactive discussion, and allowed us to respond to questions efficiently, and to the best of our ability.


We also decided to participate in the journal initiative proposed by the Maastricht team - this involved several stages and culminated in a journal full of great articles from various iGEM teams.

Firstly, we submitted an abstract to register interest in the journal. Then, each team had to produce the initial article and upload it to the Maastricht journal site for peer review. The review process consisted of teams examining each other’s articles - our article was reviewed, but we also had to evaluate articles from two other teams. The feedback received during this process was very helpful and resulted in a final article worth its place in the journal.

The final stage was to vote for the best papers. Finally, we got the notification that our article would be included in the journal, which was very exciting! Our article focused on the breadth of our project and the three main aspects: control, DBHB production and the previous research that shows DBHB could have a role in neuroprotection. It is not at all common knowledge that DBHB could produce this effect, so the main point of writing the article was to inform a multitude of people not only about our project but also the potential of DBHB as a neuroprotectant.

The article is available to download herewith the full journal available from team MSP-Maastricht's wiki.



From our interactions with a range of stakeholders (academic, medical professional, carer and industry representatives), we decided to design and produce a leaflet which provides stakeholders (e.g. potential end users and medical experts) with key information regarding our product, NeuroTone. This is in line with most medicinal treatments where there is usually a complimentary leaflet or flipbook which is given to patients prior to use to provide the patient with essential information about the treatment and whether they need to do anything to prepare for it. Our leaflet aimed to provide the reader with key information regarding what NeuroTone is, how it is delivered and the benefits/ risks associated with it.

From a design standpoint, the leaflet was chosen over a flipbook because we wanted to produce a deliverable which encapsulated all the required information into a small package. A leaflet in comparison to a flipbook is considerably smaller and could be taken away more easily, for example in a handbag. The leaflet itself succinctly provides the key details about Neurotone, inviting those who wanted to know more to contact us.