Team:IISc-Bangalore/Judging
Judging
This section describes in detail the medal criteria that we have fulfilled. It also lays down the details of the Special Awards for which we have applied, and why we chose to apply for it. This is meant to be a ready reckoner for judges, in order to make their judging experience as smooth and hassle-free as possible.
Medals
Bronze
Competition deliverables
Wiki: You are actually navigating through our wiki, hope you are enjoying it!
Project Promotion Video: Wanting to see what our project is about in only 2 minutes? Don't hesitate to watch our promotional video submitted in iGEM Video Universe platform. Click on the following link.
Judging Form: Visit our Judging Form
Attributions
Take a look at the Members and Attributions pages to find out what has been the master area of each of our multidisciplinary team members.
Project Inspiration and Description
The project originated from the need to give back to our local communities by tackling organophosphate pollution and its impacts. For more details on our project inspiration and description, please visit our Description page.
Contribution
We documented several Standard Biological parts on the registry (view Parts page). We have also created other generalised action plans for Human Practices which other iGEM teams can build upon. Our wiki has been created on a new theme - minimalism in design. We have also created a Python script to allow templates in the WikiSync created by iGEM BITS Goa. Please visit our Contributions page for further details.
Silver
Engineering Success
We followed the Engineering Design Cycle for the accomplishment of each individual component of our biosensor. Iteratively going through the Build-Design-Test-Learn cycle has been the edifice of our planning and design. For more details, visit our Engineering page.
Collaborations
We collaborated with several iGEM teams across the world to make the synthetic biology community stronger. We hosted virtual meetups, mentored a team as well as shared ideas with other iGEMers. Come and visit our Collaborations page!
Human Practices
We made sure to get advice from researchers, activists and experts in several fields at every step of the project in order to ensure it is responsible and good for the world. We documented how we incorporated their advice in our project design and implementation. Have a look at our Human Practices page for more details.
Proposed Implementation
We analyzed and identified the potential users and beneficiaries of final device. We managed to describe in detail the final prototype of CellOPHane. Safety and security have also been duly considered. Please visit our Implementation page for further details
Gold
Integrated Human Practices
The influence of Human Practices over our project's development has been key in all stages. We have interacted with stakeholders at every stage of our project and tried to incorporate their suggestions. We have been reflective of our values, responsible in our analysis of threats and challenges and responsive in engaging in a meaningful conversation with our stakeholders. Take a look at the Integrated Human Practices page to see how the world has affected our project!
Project Modelling
Two mathematical models were developed in order to judge the inapplicability of SpyDock for our project and to characterise the working of our proposed filter. Come and take a look at our Modelling page!
Proof of Concept
We have tried to show that the proposed parts of ours reduce the organophosphate load in a solution. Our experiments have demonstrated this using bacterial cultures and cell lysates. We have thus managed to establish our idea on a proof of concept level. Feel free to explore our Proof of Concept page!
Science Communications
Our team created several ways to reach the widest range of audience as possible, and to disseminate information about synthetic biology: writing a primer for children, writing booklets on Safety, participating in interviews and creating new games for children. Check our Education and Communication page for further details.
Awards
Best Education
Our team has actively tried to include more people in contributing to synthetic biology by creating educational components targeted towards children, adolescents and general public. We have tried to fill the lacuna in educational content on synthetic biology, particularly in India, by creating a primer, educational packages and audiobooks. We have tried to promote democratized and inclusivist educational content by conforming to the Universal Design Principles for Learning. Besides these, we designed a game for teaching SynBio to kids and collaborated with other organizations to organize lectures on SynBio for children. We have documented our activities exhaustively so that future teams can build upon our educational initiatives. We have given interviews to GenScript, NGSF, IIScConnect about our project, SynBio and iGEM to create awareness. Not only this, but we have also launched a symposium titled SynByte, which had talks by eminent synthetic biologists from all over the globe. We have planned future collaborations to distribute these materials to more individuals in order to continue inspiring them about the application of SynBio. Science communication is as much about hearing as it is about speaking. We have tried to make the entire exercise a dialog by systematically collecting feedback from the participants in our educational programmes. Using their feedback, we have continuously adapted our educational content to suit the needs of the learners
Best IHP
To us, Integrated HP is understanding and emphasizing the mutualistic relationship between people and science. We have followed a human-centred design process by understanding the multifarious dimensions of the problem and identifying possible stakeholders. From there, our research was driven by the values and needs of the diverse stakeholders we spoke with, including social scientists and biologists. These conversations were sustained and meaningful in every part of our HP journey. With this insight, we reached out to experts who informed the technical aspects of our solution. Together, our conversations resulted in an approach that accounted for nuanced values, in order to create a good and responsible solution to the problem. Throughout our journey, we have concentrated on the 3Rs of IHP - Reflective, Responsible and Responsive. We have reflected on our goals and values, our stakeholders and used systematic methodologies to identify them. As a responsible team, we have tried to understand the possible threats and the socio-economic impact of our project. We have also been responsive to the sensitivities of various stakeholders, and modified parts of our project based on their valuable inputs. Besides adapting a human centred design process, ourselves, we have documented our HP journey exhaustively on our wiki for future iGEMers. We have also created a toolkit of actionables by expanding on the work of iGEM Calgary '19 to help future teams in their HP journeys.
Best Model
Team iGEM IISc-Bangalore has tried to come up with a mathematical model relevant to our project. We have used simple fluid mechanics and enzyme kinetics to come up with models for the functionality of our device. We have actively improved upon and added new components to our model based on inputs from our stakeholders. We have clearly documented our achievements on the team wiki and provided a detailed description of the definition of the various terms and their values in a separate page on our wiki for easy access. The model has helped us to test and understand the feasibility of the solution proposed by us and has helped us to reject other alternatives. We have used data from literature to construct our model and are in the process of collecting data to validate our model and refine it further.
Best Sustainable Development Impact
Our team has focused not just on creating a filter for the purpose of combatting organophosphate pollution, but also steadfastly tried to comply with the SDGs enunciated by the United Nations using the power of synthetic biology. We have tried to devote ourselves to SDG 3 and SDG 6 through our project by trying to ensure the availability of clean drinking water and the prevention of mortalities associated with the ill-effects of pollution. We have also concentrated on fulfilment of SDG 4 by creating quality educational materials suited to be of interest to as diverse a set of audience as possible. We have tried to promote inclusivity in all our communication ventures by ensuring availability of our materials in multiple languages, chosen to cover the length and breadth of our country. In continuously staying in touch with all the SDG stakeholders relevant to our project and improving our idea based on their suggestions, we have established our commitment towards the fulfilment of the SDGs.
Best Wiki
As must be evident from our wiki, we have tried to stick to the art of minimalism. Not just on our wiki, "less is more" has been a guiding principle for all our design-related activities. Many previous iGEM wikis, including ones which have been rewarded, are extensively animation-heavy and have precipitously large loading times, which reduces their accessibility, particularly in developing countries with not-so-good Internet facilities. We have tried to change this, and we believe that the extensive documentation provided on our wiki despite the minimalistic design shall be an inspiration for future teams. We have also rigorously stuck to the 'three clicks rule', and incorporated features to improve accessibility and navigability like introductory contents and abstracts on every page, a "Back to Top" button and so on.
Besides these design and aesthetic aspects of our wiki, we have made incorporated several changes in the conventional backend development tools. Bootstrap happens to be the popular choice among high quality wikis of iGEM. However, we abandoned Bootstrap in favour of MaterializeCSS, a relatively lightweight and simple framework. Furthermore, MaterializeCSS and AnimateOnScroll are the only frameworks we have used on our website, in addition to inbuilt MathJax and JQuery. By doing so, we hope to achieve a decrease in loading times for our wiki. We have also attempted to create a fully functional mobile version of our wiki and have used a light preloader to aid the users, without compromising on our reduced loading times. We have also uploaded all our code on the GitHub repository for access by all future iGEM teams. While we have used WikiSync for our wiki design, we have also created a new Python script to incorporate Templates using WikiSync and thus expanded the functionality of WikiSync.