Team:USTC Software/human practice

As a tutor game aimed at improving the understanding and facilitating IGEM and synthesis biology, iGAME itself is exactly a great way of human practice. With iGAME, people do not feel any distance to synthesis biology any more. Actually, it is time for everyone to join this trend to be as cool as Sheldon’s new biologist girlfriend. However, we do not stop here. We paid great effort to the safety issue and we have been dedicated to improving the knowledge of synthesis biology from classes and tried to share the part we contribute to the worldwide. We innovatively plot a new way of spreading the spirits of IGEM by starting our own community and we will never stop sharing and communicating.

Most of our work is mainly done in front of computers, which is not ergonomically to programmers as working in such environment may cause much exhaust and stress. Therefore, we made a series of regulations to guarantee they are not exposed to computers constantly for too long time and recreational area is within 10 meters. What is more, every time our programmers go to web labs, we make sure that there would be safety equipment as well as accompanies for them.

As a IGEM team, we try to let people as many as possible to know what synthesis biology is. Therefore, advisors of our team, Haiyan Liu and Jiong Hong, have established a set of synthesis biology curriculum this summer. We have done many works related to human practice on the curriculum. 1. Jiong Hong, advisor of our team, gave lectures introducing safety and ethnics issues of synthesis biology. 2. Luojun Wang, members of our team, gave lectures promoting iGAME. 3. A survey* on how students know about synthesis biology and their interest for tutor game was made.(*the survey statistics comes from a sample of 240 students. Numbers of undergraduates, masters and PhDs are 160, 60 and 20)

We tried many methods to plot our survey more straightforwardly and clearly before we finally chose Circos [http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/circos mkweb.bcgsc.ca/circos]. Circos is biological software used to plot genome elements and relationship. Here, we innovatively used Circos to demonstrate our survey.

In the graph, there are three circles. The inner circle stands for their knowledge of synthesis biology, and middle circle stands for their interests of iGame. Deeper the color is, the more they know of synthesis biology or the more they are interested in iGame. The outer circle, however, stands for their major;light green for biology major and light orange for other majors. As the graph shows, synthesis biology is still new to them as the majority have little idea of it, for which is what we will continue our project in the future. However, we are delighted to see that their interests of tutor game are fairly strong.

Referring to the possible game types, adventure and strategy games are students’ favorite, while some of them prefer stimulation and action games. In our program, we tried our best to listen to their voice and develop a game which is both educational and appealing.

We’d like to share what we have achieved with the world, so we did and will do a great deal to communicate with others and learn. For example, we collaborate closely with USTC wet team to learn what biology majors think of iGame and improve. Several seminars have been hold to make sure our program can really help the promotion of both synthesis biology and our tutor game. In addition, further transnational communication is not absent, like we had a deep talk with Dr. Joy Yueyue Zhang*(*BIOS Centre, London School of Economics and Politics Science) on how our program can change the development of both IGEM and make biology a better subject.

Yet we do not stop here. We have sent emails to other teams for further communications and asked for their opions on how we can improve iGame. What is more, all our codes are shared on github[http://github.com/jkdirac/igame]. With fixes and new features putting forward every day,any one in any corner of the world can learn and keep update of our work, not just from the surface, but from codes and essense of our work. This is really a great way of communication, for we do not have to say too much to put our achieves across to those who really want to know our work, which really works. Great contributions have been given through github and we get a lot of advices and opinions as well.

To better promote synthesis and the spirit of IGEM, we decided to establish a community together with IGEM USTC team. For the up-coming community, we decided to set regular classes and lectures for both synthesis biology and IGEM. We will open our laboratory to our community members and basic skills of biology experiment, like PCR, will be taught. Of course, this is the main field we will update our progress in the future.