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Science Centre
The Science Centre and the current Biotechnology Room
Delft University of Technology contains its own technology museum, [http://www.sciencecentre.tudelft.nl/ Science Centre Delft]
, where you can discover what science and technology mean for the society. The museum is mainly based on primary school children who can experience technique issues in a playful and experimental way.
The Science Centre has a biotechnology room in which movies about micro-organisms, made by the
previous TU Delft iGEM team 2010
, are shown. Furthermore, the room contains a flow cabinet and a laboratory table, which is used for workshops during the weekend. On one wall microscopic pictures from micro-organisms are displayed and on another a quote.
Because we think biotechnology is so much more then this, we decided to contact the Science Centre to see what we could do to make the room more attractive for children to enter and to let them discover a world of little animals which can not be seen by the naked eye.
The Ideas
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We had several appointments with Michael van der Meer and Liesbeth van Hees of the Science Centre to discuss the possibilities and to show them our ideas. During our first appointment Michael van der Meer told us that we could basically do everything we wanted: we had to be creative! We therefore came up with a couple ideas. We wanted to make a plastic microscope with a round eyepiece of 30 cm and a zoom button on the side. This eyepiece is a circular touch screen on which a number of different microbes are depicted. A few applications are:
- find specific information on a specific microbe after you clicked on it
- increase the number of microbes on the screen and learn more about their cell division
- select a micro-organism in which you are interested and grow a pure culture
- choose a microbe which has an advantage over another microbe by selection
Besides the microscope we had the idea to make a competitive video game in which children learn to importance of “good micro-organisms”. There is a general trend that people are more familiar with “bad micro-organisms” and think that all micro-organisms are harmful. But there are so many microbes which are important for us and we think that it is important children know at an early age about their existence. To represent synthetic biology in this room, we want to develop a game in which children can design their own microbe. Moreover, since we have a chemistry student in our team and the chemistry faculty is not represented in the Science Centre, we want to show some visual attractive, chemical experiments in the flow cabinet. We also had the ideas of a ceiling projection and a movie about good versus bad micro-organisms, since this is the theme of our human pratice part.
