Team:Calgary/Second Life

Updates

Second Life is an online, virtual world, where every object, costume, creature and patch of land is crafted by inhabitants. It is a 3D chat engine, videogame platform, and virtual classroom all rolled into one.

iGEM Calgary is venturing aggressively into Second Life, harnessing the power of its modeling and scripting tools to create interactive models of classical operons and synthetic biology systems. We will imagine the future of synthetic biology, and walk students through the laboratories of today. In the past, our team has run seminars and lectures to introduce new students to the terminology and technology behind iGEM. In the future, students will interact with model systems directly and experiment with them to see how they work.

Access to Second Life is free, simply create a free account HERE, download the client, and you're good to go!

So what does iGEM have to do with Second Life? Well, the problem with doing an iGEM project at university is this: sooner or later all of the students graduate. Even those who decide to participate in an iGEM team several years in a row (those poor souls!) have to get on with their lives sooner or later. The result is that a huge amount of time is spent educating the new year of students, and this problem can be especially acute for teams of entirely undergraduates like ours. Many of our students are in their first or second year, many have never been in a molecular biology lab before, and they've got to learn all the ropes if they want to have a hope of competing at iGEM level.

Ultimately, all this time spent training the next generation will pay off (we hope!) with a generation of new scientists, the synthetic biologists. But for right now, we really just need to get all the cloning and biobrick assembly and system tests and a dozen other kinds of work done by the end of summer.

Enter Second Life. SL has gained a lot of attention for its potential as an educational platform. The most often touted feature is that SL can offer a classroom-like environment for people at any distance from one another. While the iGEM Calgary island will make an excellent hangout for idle iGEMers the world over, our focus is less on creating a classroom, and more on presenting concepts directly. We want to make it easier for new students to grasp the basics of synthetic biology by making it accessible and interactive. This is where SL's object creation and scripting facilities come into play: we can create anything we want, from molecules to cells to lab equipment, and then make it behave like the real thing.