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From 2010.igem.org

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.

Safety

As a software team, our team does not produce any typical biological safety or ethnic issues. However, we still take safety into account from as many aspects as possible:

1. Safety for programmers

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.

2. Safety for public

We are aware what our software will bring to teenagers or youngsters, and our software is ensured that no violent or sexual scene or content is included. We also did a lot of work to estimate and reduce the possible errors or faults users may encounter in the future.

3.Safety for software

To better protect our intellectual property rights, we have consulted IPRs centre of USTC in case of future problem. We will restrict the use of our software and we will apply for a patent later.

4.Safety for campus

We are quite aware when we perform our work or lecture in campus, and no disorder or turbulence has shown during in the above activity.

Human Practice,"the C project"

Although we do software, we also keep eyes on promotion of synthesis biology and sharing our own program. Therefore, we started a long term human practice, “the C project”, since this summer.“the C project”, as we call, consists of three parts: Curriculum, Communication and Community.

Curriculum

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)

Analysis of the results of the survey

The Circos Map We tried many methods to plot our survey more straightforwardly and clearly before we finally chose 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.

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.

Communication

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 our game 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.

Community

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.

More information of our community and other human practice of USTC IGEM team, please click[1]!