Team:TEC COSTA RICA/Communication
Education & Communication
Our team was determined in creating content that could work as educational aid for everyone. Our goal was for our content to be accesible, easy to navigate and understand. This way we can contribute in spreading our knowledge and helping others learn about biotechnology.
We realized that making useful content brought it’s complications related with communication. Since we wanted our content to be interactive, include graphic support and be as easy to understand as possible. This meant going through a process of not only investigating and analyzing content that already exists, but re-thinking how to best communicate certain types of information so that it’s explained in the best way possible.
Furthermore, our team also had to work through communicating our ideas with the designers in charge of creating the interactives and bringing our ideas to life. This was a difficult task, that with the help of time and trial and error, we were able to obtain a good work dynamic.
It is also important to mention that we explain a bit more about our other contributions in this area in our excellence in another area page.
During the creation process, we came across Labxchange and saw that they were also working on developing similar ideas. Labxchange was kind enough to meet with us and listen to our ideas, worries and goals. In the end, they invited us to display our work on their website as a way to diffuse the information better. It is important to note, that the topics of our interactives were also discussed throughout this meeting. We decided to develop on topics that were previously not developed and would compliment well with the work they already have on their site.
As of right now, we have been able to develop one virtual lab which guides the user through a lab experience regarding the process of transformation. Additionally, three interactives have been developed; one explains the generalities about synthetic biology, another the assembly process, and lastly one explains and guides the user through an auxotrophy lab. Lastly, we developed a complete timeline regarding avances in synthetic biology.
These resources ensure:
- interactive learning
- information coupled with graphic design for better understanding
- curated knowledge that would otherwise be hard to find
Transformation: Virtual Lab
We would like to clarify, that while all of this content has been developed in english; we spoke to labxchange about how important the translation of our work is to ensure more accesibility. We even offered to translate their work to spanish, nevertheless, they told us they had a translation team who was in the process of translating all content posted on their page. Also, labxchange is a page that is free to use, which is also important in terms of accesibility.
In terms of design, our design team was careful in making sure that our work was easy to navigate for everyone. This means using fonts that are easy to read and are identifiable by screen readers. The colors are used as a highlight but are not essential to the interaction, so any person who is color blind can still use our work.
Our virtual lab has 1219 views and counting, 17 favorites and has been a resourse used in university courses here in Costa Rica and in the SynBio clubs we host. Terminar con el resto.
Synthetic Biology Interactive
Our design process consisted primarily on a lot of organization and communication between our designers and the rest of the members.
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Step 1
For each project, a script would be written out by the biotechnology engineers, consisting of all the information that needed to be included. In this same document, pictures, graphs or any graphic data was added to help designers have references on how some information was meant to be shown. Afterwards, designers would read the script and have a meeting so that the script could be explained to them.
02
Step 2
Once the whole team was on the same page, designers could develop a first draft which consisted of basic wireframes of how the project would look like.
03
Step 3
These basic wireframes would go through various revisions where changes were made, information was eliminated or added until we achieved the best result. Once the last revision is done, our designers set off on adding all the final details which are color, vectors, etc.
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Step 4
The final step was to send off the document to be animated by the computer scientist, this means that we can add interaction where it is necessary. Once the interactive works, it can then be sent to Labxchange and launched on their page.
Labxchange believes in the importance of shedding light to peoples stories, especially their path towards a career in STEM. This is why they also feature the narratives of three of our group members, you can go and read their stories here:
Even after our participation in iGEM 2021, we hope that our work with Labxchange continues, either our team keeps developing content for their page or we pass on our knowledge to future iGEM teams from Costa Rica.
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