In 2020, the Fly Board voted to use part of its reserve fund to support efforts to increase trainee participation as well as equity and diversity in the Drosophila community. An awards committee decides how the money will be spent each year, and from 2020–2022, the committee posted a very broad call for applications from non-profit programs that introduce middle school, high school, or college students to Drosophila research. Five or six such applications were funded in each of the three years, and the programs have recruited a diverse set of students worldwide to learn about working with flies. This year’s awarded programs and individuals are:

eCLOSE provides training in genetics research to participants from age 10 through retirement. The Fly Board award supported eight undergraduates in their most advanced program, the Undergraduate Bridge to Research. Over the course of 10 weeks during the summer, participants identified a major health challenge facing a community that was meaningful to them on a personal level. They conducted a chemical genetic screen to identify nutrients that might alter phenotypes in fly models of the disease of interest. Leveraging those results, the students designed independent research projects ranging from biochemical analysis of signaling pathways to developmental biology of ovaries, brains, intestines, and social behavior changes among treated and/or mutant flies. Two students have already attained research positions in fly labs, with plans to use their work for honors thesis and capstone projects as they complete their undergraduate degrees. The Fly Board award provided the reagents and materials needed for students to conduct their independent work, expanding the experimental options available and increasing the depth of the research. 

The Drosophila Stock Center at the University of Mysore, Karnataka, India is currently maintaining a collection of 50 Drosophila species and over 2,000 stocks that are provided to researchers and teaching faculty at colleges and universities in India for use in teaching and learning genetics. The Stock Center also trains teachers and individual researchers through hands-on training workshops and short-term collaborations. The Fly Board funding was used to support a hands-on training program in December 2023 to introduce teachers of undergraduate students in India to lab techniques that they can then use in their classes. The workshop covered morphology, genetic mutants, polytene chromosome inversions, use of Drosophila for understanding biological inheritance, behavioral exercises, collection and categorization of wild type Drosophila, study of polygenic traits, and study of gene expression using reporter constructs.

Games of Flies and Genes is the new, ambitious project of Engage Nepal with Science that will be supported by Fly Board funding. It aims to encourage science educators in Nepal to work collaboratively with fly researchers to make their genetics lessons more interactive and dynamic and facilitate the learning of this important part of the biology curriculum. The project involves four fly researchers from the US and Nepal, who will work directly with educators and students from five schools in Nepal to explore Drosophila genetics and gain hands-on experience with fly research by visiting the Research Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology. Participants will learn about Drosophila through various engaging methods, look at flies under the microscope, play a game based on genes and laws of heredity, and will also make their own fly models with modeling clay. These workshops have the potential to revolutionize the field of genetics education in Nepal, offering students an experience that will not only deepen their understanding of genetics but also inspire the next generation of scientists.

Osamu Shimmi is using Fly Board funding for an outreach initiative to improve Drosophila research and education in Estonia. His outreach efforts aim to develop easy-to-use study materials on Drosophila for middle and high school students in the Estonian language. He also writes articles for a popular science magazine to introduce Drosophila as a learning model for biology teachers in middle and high school. On September 29, 2023 he hosted school children in the lab as part of the activities for Science Day at the University of Tartu, Estonia, to promote Drosophila research through outreach.

Small But Mighty: Drosophila as a Powerful Tool for Biomedical Research is aimed at educating secondary school students in Akure, Nigeria, about the possibilities of Drosophila research, and providing them with educational materials to take back to their schools. The Fly Board-funded workshop was hosted at the Federal University of Technology Akure in November 2023 and featured lectures on basic Drosophila husbandry and genetics, practical hands-on activities, career talks, and more. Nilda Barbosa, a professor from the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil, gave a virtual lecture, while Ganiyu Oboh and Adedayo Ademiluyi from the Federal University of Technology Akure, Nigeria spoke in person. This event had a large impact on awareness of Drosophila research in Nigeria and has the potential to be self-sustaining.

Enhancing Biology Education held a three-day workshop in November 2023, funded by the Fly Board, to train teachers-in-training (B.Sc(ed.)/B.Ed students) in Nigeria on the utilization of Drosophila as a cost-effective teaching tool in high school biology. Of the 20 in-person participants, 60% were females from underrepresented regions in Nigeria. Additional applicants were able to join virtually. The workshop ran from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day and the curriculum included talks, practical sessions, and micro-teaching. 

FlyBoard is pleased to offer funding to five outreach programs, which aim to increase early career scientist participation, equity, and diversity in the Drosophila research community.

Amos Abolaji, Drosophila Research and Training Centre
The Drosophila Research and Training Centre (DRTC) is a not-for-profit and non-political organization based in Ibadan, Oyo, Nigeria. It facilitates the use of Drosophila melanogaster as a cost-effective, alternative model for biomedical research and teaching in Sub-Saharan African countries. As part of its Drosophila for Schools initiative, DRTC will work with 10 public and private secondary schools in Ibadan to introduce students to Drosophila research. Researchers will visit the schools to discuss the importance of fly research and demonstrate fly handling and microscopy, and two students from each school will then visit the DRTC for further training.

Dotun Adeyinka, Science Education for Youngsters 
Science Education for Youngsters (SEFY) is a registered non-governmental and non-profit organization working to create science-awareness in Nigeria. In collaboration with Osun State University, SEFY will organize an event for 50 secondary school students in Osogbo, Nigeria to introduce the Drosophila model system, demonstrate lab equipment, and carry out hands-on training using Foldscope microscopes.

Eric Hastie, Discovering Drosophila Development
Discovering Drosophila Development is a summer research experience for undergraduates, which will be held at UNC-Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) in collaboration with Durham Technical Community College (DTCC). About 10-15  DTCC students will be trained in multiple scientific techniques to conduct student-driven discovery with unknown outcomes including: meeting and collaborating with scientists in UNC-CH Drosophila labs, learning fly culture and maintenance, researching literature to develop hypotheses, and using microscopy and antibody labelling. The goal of the program is to create micropublications via microPublication Biology and to encourage DTCC students to transfer to UNC.

Stephen Klusza, Genomics Education Partnership 
The Genomics Education Partnership (GEP) is a 140+ faculty collective that provides undergraduate students with bioinformatic CUREs on manual gene annotation in multiple Drosophila fruit fly species. As part of a global initiative to increase accessibility and diversity retention, GEP is working to translate their “Understanding Eukaryotic Genes” modules on manual gene annotation for undergraduates from English to Spanish. They are also creating accompanying Spanish-language videos. These new materials will be a first step to recruiting and retaining English as a Second Language students in Drosophila research across all postsecondary institutions.

Alana O’Reilly, eCLOSE Institute
The eCLOSE Institute will host a one-week summer camp program that introduces biomedical research to students in Philadelphia, more than 60% of whom are under-represented minorities. Due to Covid-19, the current hybrid format will ship students a “lab in a box” that they use to investigate the influence of diet on Drosophila development, guided by online instructors. The program aims to increase students’ research literacy, providing them with an understanding of what a research career is and technical and conceptual foundations for continuation in science.

Guest authors Sanjai Patel and Andreas Prokop explain why school biology lessons are important places to advocate fundamental biomedical research, and they present strategies developed by the Manchester Fly Facility to bring Drosophila research into primary and secondary classrooms.

The need for fundamental biology research has perhaps never been greater than today, yet the conditions for meaningful biology research are in dire straits (e.g. 15; 5; 46; 42; 23; 25; 16; 12; bulliedintobadscience.org). Rectifying this situation requires science communication (scicomm) based on genuine long-term commitment paired with clever, engaging, and impactful strategies and narratives — aspiring to reach out to relevant target audiences and eventually also convince decision and policy makers.

Today’s school pupils will shape the future of our society. They are therefore a highly relevant audience for scientists who want to have a lasting impact on public support for fundamental research and science-backed policy. There is also clear evidence that experiences in early life impact later attitudes and decision making (1; 6; 17). Importantly, scientists working in fundamental biomedical research have the advantage that their area of expertise tends to be closely related to topics taught in school biology lessons. This provides excellent opportunities to collaborate with teachers in order to improve lesson content and the pupils’ experience of science.

I regularly encounter long-term retention of school experiences when talking with visitors at science fairs about Drosophila research and its importance (36); those who have seen Drosophila in schools, even decades ago, often want to share this experience with me and tend to engage more openly in dialogue from the start. Therefore, engaging with schools should be a no-brainer for scientists with a long-term vision, and we provide here some insights into the school work of the “Manchester Fly Facility” (ManFly) initiative, as an example that readers might find helpful.

Aims of the “Manchester Fly Facility” scicomm initiative

To our knowledge, the Manchester Fly Facility (ManFly) is the only long-term initiative dedicated to communicating and advocating for Drosophila research, alongside more research-oriented initiatives such as DrosAfrica (22; 44)and partly also TReND in Africa. Primarily driven by the two authors of this article, ManFly was launched in 2011 and has gradually expanded into six main areas of activity that reach a wide spectrum of audiences (26b; 27). These include:

• the development of resources for fly practical training;
• presentations at science fairs;
• science fair organization (e.g. the “Brain Box” event with over 5K visitors; 37);
• the making of educational movies (19);
• school engagement (see below); and
• encouraging other drosophilists and teachers to adopt our scicomm ideas and resources (see below).

Two of these ManFly activities stand out for their potential impact. Firstly, the fly training resources have had a major impact worldwide, with ~100,000 views and ~31,000 downloads across the four dissemination platforms (8; 28;29;41). Secondly, our school work has had the strongest growth and likely has the biggest future potential, as will be explained in the following.

A more effective way to engage pupils

As detailed in previous publications (26b; 27), ManFly’s school outreach was born out of our ideas developed for science fair presentations. Initially, we went into schools to showcase Drosophila research but learned very quickly that this approach is not very effective. Although it does address one important objective of teachers, that is, to bring pupils in contact with real researchers, it is far more powerful to also align with the teachers’ task of conveying curriculum-relevant content. This approach gains the attention of more pupils whilst generating memorable encounters with fruit flies, and it provides excellent opportunities to develop true dialogue between the two professional groups of scientists and teachers.

By now, ManFly has gathered experiences from over 80 events, including visits to schools, visits by school classes, and teacher seminars. We use these events to optimize our strategies and resources, and have formalized this approach through the launch of the “droso4schools” project in 2015 (10; 26a).

The droso4schools project: teaching with flies not about flies

The overarching objective of droso4schools is to use Drosophila as an effective tool for teaching curriculum-relevant content in biology school classes — ideally to achieve that its use would become a recommended or prescribed strategy in national curricula. Drosophila has essential advantages to this end: fruit fly research covers a broad spectrum of fundamental biology topics, providing excellent conceptual understanding, and there are many opportunities to perform micro-experiments that are memorable, cheap, simple, and easy to set up, even by teachers with little background in this area.

To achieve our objectives we capitalize on mutual collaboration with teachers: we as researchers bring our scientific experience and knowledge and can suggest conceptual improvements to content, and spice things up with engaging anecdotes, experiments, and relevant examples. Teachers provide the essential professional expertise of the curriculum and of effective teaching styles that match the realities of school life.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQKFtt3p2C8&w=500]

To implement teacher collaboration and/or get professional feedback, we use three different strategies:

• We place graduate students as teaching assistants in schools and have regular meetings during this placement (10; 26a).
• We invite teachers to continuing professional development events, which is an effective way of obtaining feedback and hearing a wider spectrum of teacher views (2).
• We build trust through repeated extracurricular school visits involving up to 200 pupils experiencing 3–4 different lessons in a single day. This also provides excellent opportunities to test new or improved resources (34).

The key products of all our school activities are our school lesson resources (Box 1; 30). So far, we have developed six lessons that are completed for teacher use and comprise a PowerPoint file accompanied by support materials (homework tasks, activity sheets, teacher notes, risk assessments). Two further lessons are under development but are already suited for extracurricular school visits. All of these lessons use Drosophila as a teaching tool to address a specific curriculum-relevant topic and are spiced up with micro-experiments and examples of research relevance.

Our classes are highly interactive and all contain micro-experiments. Examples shown are: A) using optogenetics to induce epilepsy-like seizures; B) identifying genetic marker mutations; C) performing dissections of maggots and colour reactions to demonstrate enzymatic activity; D) performing the climbing assay followed by data analysis and statistics. Experimental instructions are available at (39).

Outreach opportunities in primary schools

Most of our school resources aim at the higher levels of secondary school. More recently we also explored how to introduce Drosophila in meaningful ways in primary schools. Primary school engagement reaches kids at an even earlier age and provides opportunities to spawn fascination for and appreciation of nature, biology, or evolutionary theory, thus potentially influencing their future attitudes towards societal, ecological, or scientific challenges (see also 13; 14). But primary schools also pose new challenges:

• primary teachers tend to have less or no scientific training, and the nature of any collaboration tends to be less science-centred than in secondary schools;
• science is not as high a priority in primary schools (45);
• pupils are curiosity-driven but less prepared to follow scientific logic; it can sometimes be surprising what messages kids take away from lessons.

Illustrating the metamorphosis of muscles during the pupal stage of Drosophila to pupils. Source: movie taken and modified from Wikimedia (4).

For primary schools, the national school curriculum in England lists three relevant topics: inheritance, life cycle, and evolution (7), of which we chose the latter two. For both topics, Drosophila offers fantastic conceptual and experimental opportunities, as is detailed in our recent blog post (35). For example, pupils can observe and protocol the life cycle of flies in only two weeks and there is unique understanding of the metamorphosis that transforms Drosophila maggots into flies. The surprising fact that concepts of human biology can be discovered through work in flies is an example par excellence for concepts of deep homology, evolutionary trees, and the idea of common ancestors (11; this can be further enriched in secondary schools by uniquely enlightening fly examples of population genetics or speciation; 9; 3; 24). To actively engage the kids with evolution, they use microscopes to look at flies carrying marker mutations, and then use this experience to jointly invent an evolutionary tree.

Screenshot from the evolution lesson. Fly images were generated using the free “Genotype Builder” (29; 41).

The key challenges: evaluating and marketing our resources

Developing our lesson pool was a lengthy and laborious process, yet it was only the first step; since then, we have been faced with the far greater challenge of (a) evaluating the lessons and (b) encouraging others to use them.

Carrying out evaluations is a science of its own and requires strategy, time, and human resources to degrees that must be carefully considered from the start (43). So far, we have used simple surveys. In these surveys, pupils usually expressed positive views about enjoyment of the event, seem to have gained new understanding of biology topics (details in 34and 35), and the data suggest that we are able to ignite an interest in Drosophila: thus, before our school visits, awareness of fruit fly research was low, whereas afterwards there was strong support for introducing Drosophila in classrooms and even the use of fruit flies in research. These results look very promising but will have to be properly validated, for example by using pre- versus post-event surveys to assess knowledge gain, long-term surveys to test knowledge retention, or homework tasks to appraise depth of understanding and of subject engagement.

Evaluation results from a primary and a secondary school visit (details in 34; 35) demonstrating how lack of knowledge about Drosophila research can be turned into strong support. Click image to see a larger version.

To have maximum impact, we aim to encourage the use of our resources and ideas within the communities of teachers and drosophilists. This requires spreading awareness of the resources and facilitating their use. As an essential step to this end, we freely share our resources, for which we launched two dedicated figshare.com repository sites: the first one is primarily for teachers and hosts the six completed lessons (37); the second site is for drosophilists and provides access to extracurricular lessons and science fair materials (39).

As a further measure, we launched the droso4schools support website (20). This website introduces and links to our resources, provides lesson-specific pages with details about the content, and additional information about Drosophila (“Why fly?” and “Organs“).

These online resources provide proof-of-principle for our strategy and can now develop their own momentum, either by being actively used or serving as a template for resource development. With this in mind, we are promoting them through blog posts (30; 34; 35), talks and workshops at international conferences (31; 32; 40), journal articles for teachers (10) or drosophilists (26a), and finding allies who can help to drive the agenda politically or institutionally (see last section).

An appeal to scientists to join the school endeavor

What has been achieved so far with our school work is promising, as illustrated not only by the evaluations, but also by teacher and researcher comments from across the globe, as evidenced in our impact document (21). However, we hope that more teachers and drosophilists will be inspired to capitalize on our resources — be it using them as they are, adapting them for modified classes, or taking them as examples for designing lessons on new topics! If the principal strategy gains sufficient momentum and more of us adopt the necessary collaborative spirit across disciplines, communities and countries, and the relevant learned societies and science organizations drive the science education agenda politically (33), there is a realistic chance that flies can become established as routinely used teaching tools in schools — to the benefit of teachers, pupils, and researchers alike.

About the authors:

Both authors work at the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Healthof The University of Manchester. Sanjai Patelis the manager of the Manchester Fly Facility, Andreas Prokopis professor of neurobiology and academic head of the facility, and together theydrive the “Manchester Fly Facility” initiative and the ‘droso4schools‘ project mentioned in this blog post.         

References

(1) Archer, L., DeWitt, J., Osborne, J., Dillon, J., Willis, B., Wong, B. (2012). Science Aspirations, Capital, and Family Habitus:How Families Shape Children’s Engagement and Identification With Science. American Educational Research Journal 49,881-908 — (LINK)

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(4) Chinta, R., Tan, J. H., Wasser, M. (2012). The study of muscle remodeling in Drosophila metamorphosis using in vivo microscopy and bioimage informatics. BMC Bioinformatics 13,S14-S14 — (LINK)

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(8) Fostier, M., Patel, S., Clarke, S., Prokop, A. (2015). A novel electronic assessment strategy to support applied Drosophila genetics training on university courses. G3 (Bethesda) 5,689-98 — (LINK)

(9) Green, J. E., Cavey, M., Caturegli, E., Gompel, N., Prud’homme, B. (2018). Evolution of ovipositor length in Drosophila suzukii is driven by enhanced cell size expansion and anisotropic tissue reorganization. bioRxiv  — (LINK)

(10) Harbottle, J., Strangward, P., Alnuamaani, C., Lawes, S., Patel, S., Prokop, A. (2016). Making research fly in schools: Drosophila as a powerful modern tool for teaching Biology. School Science Review 97,19-23 — (LINK)

(11) Held Jr., L. I. H. (2017). “Deep homology? Uncanny similarities of humans and flies uncovered by evo-devo.” Cambridge University Press, Cambridge — (LINK)

(12) Jones, R., Wilsdon, J. (2018). It’s time to burst the biomedical bubble in UK research — (LINK)

(13) Kover, P., Hogge, E. (2016). Teaching Evolution for Primary Children (website) — (LINK)

(14) Kover, P., Hogge, E. (2017). Engaging with primary schools: supporting the delivery of the new curriculum in evolution and inheritance. Sem Cell Dev Biol  — (LINK)

(15) Lawrence, P. (2016). The last 50 years: mismeasurement and mismanagement are impeding scientific research. Current Topics in Developmental Biology  — (LINK)

(16) Maartens, A., Prokop, A., Brown, K., Pourquié, O. (2018). Advocating developmental biology. Development 145,dev167932 — (LINK)

(17) Maltese, A. V., Tai, R. H. (2011). Pipeline persistence: Examining the association of educational experiences with earned degrees in STEM among U.S. students. Science Education 95,877-907 — (LINK)

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(21) Manchester Fly Facility (2015b). Manchester Fly Facility Resources. figshare,10.6084/m9.figshare.1328031 — (LINK)

(22) Martín-Bermudo, M. D., Gebel, L., Palacios, I. M. (2017). DrosAfrica: Establishing a Drosophila community in Africa. Sem Cell Dev Biol 70,58-64 — (LINK)

(23) Martínez-Arias, A. (2015). The case of the Irish Elk, a parable for the weight of the glamour journals. Blog post in “Martinez-Arias Lab Blog” — (LINK)

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(25) Nerlich, B. (2017). Making science public: Taking stock. Blog post in “University of Nottigham Blog” — (LINK)

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(26b) Patel, S., Prokop, A. (2017). The Manchester Fly Facility: Implementing an objective-driven long-term science communication initiative. Semin Cell Dev Biol 70,38-48 — (LINK)

(27) Patel, S., Prokop, A. (2018). An objective-driven long-term initiative to communicate fundamental science to various target audiences – a Drosophila case study. Blog post in“PLOS | BLOGS” — (LINK)

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The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce that Steven Farber and Jamie Shuda are the recipients of the 2018 Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education for their extraordinary contributions to genetics education. Farber is a principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Shuda is Director of Life Science Outreach at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Left: Jamie Shuda. Right: Steven Farber.

Farber and Shuda are recognized for their creation of an outreach program called BioEYES, which provides K–12 students with hands-on biology experience using live zebrafish. The flagship program brings fish—and the tools to study them—into the classroom for an entire week, during which time students observe much of the fish’s life cycle, from mating to the hatching of larvae.

The selection of zebrafish for the program is a key factor behind its success. Farber recognized that the zebrafish, in addition to being an important model organism in genetics, has several other traits that make it ideal for the classroom. Students are captivated by working with live, moving animals, and it reassures the students that, because the fish are clear, they can be studied with the provided microscopes without harming them. Also, as vertebrates, zebrafish have many body parts in common with humans, and their development can easily be compared to human development. Once the larvae hatch, students can even observe their beating hearts.

In addition to Project BioEYES, the program has expanded to include a new project called Your Watershed, Your Backyard, in which middle-school students grow zebrafish embryos in water samples from their own local watershed to test the effects of pollution. Although this new program is only available in the Baltimore area, Project BioEYES itself is also available in Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and Melbourne. Recently, BioEYES reached its 100,000^th student, and the program continues to grow.

“BioEYES is an innovative program that harnesses the powerful fascination most of us feel when observing living, behaving organisms and developing embryos,” says Allan Spradling, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “It works well with students from all types of economic and cultural backgrounds because interest in and curiosity about life and reproduction is universal.”

GSA named the Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education in honor of the first GSA Excellence in Education Awardee, Elizabeth W. Jones (1939–2008). The Award recognizes a person or group whose efforts have made a “significant, sustained impact on genetics education at any level.” The prize will be presented to Farber and Shuda at the 59^th Annual Drosophila Research Conference, which will take place from April 11^th–15^th, 2018 in Philadelphia.

Phil Hieter, former GSA President and a Co-Chair for The Allied Genetics Conference, works at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, where Dave Ng directs the Michael Smith Laboratories Teaching Facility, AMBL. Dave developed a popular card game, Phylo, as a method to teach people about biodiversity, and Phil had an idea—what if there was a card game that highlighted the importance of model organism research?

Ultimately, GSA provided funding for several UBC summer interns to create the game mechanics and cards for a GSA Model Organisms Deck. Two undergraduates, Lu Li and Sam MacKinnon, and two graduate students, Sidney Ang and Genevieve Leduc-Robert, worked for several months fine-tuning the game and content, which then went through several rounds of editing and playtesting both within and beyond GSA. Dave hired several artists to make beautiful, unique art for the deck as well.

The GSA Model Organisms Deck will make its debut at The Allied Genetics Conference; thanks (again) to Phil’s pursuit of sponsorship partners, each TAGC attendee will receive their own deck free of charge! The GSA deck is designed to be educational; to that end, TAGC is also hosting several “Hackathons” as part of its Education Pre-Conference, not only showing participants how to play, but allowing them to use the deck to create lesson plans, new game mechanisms, and/or new cards for the deck. It’s not too late to register for this if you’re attending the meeting; simply email Anne Marie Mahoney for details.

But what is a Hackathon? What’s Phylo, and what makes the GSA deck special? We asked Dave Ng to fill us in:

What is Phylo?

Phylo began as a biodiversity-themed card game, and has been crowdsourced into existence. Because of the fluid nature of workshopping the game over the years, as well as the myriad of different expertise from the participating scientific communities, Phylo has turned into a STEM-based trading card culture with over 1000 free print-your-own cards, as well as around 15 decks that are purchasable for collecting and playing.  This includes decks that focus on specific geographical locales, women in science issues, phytochemicals, pond critters, things Darwin saw during his Beagle voyage, and the list goes on—and will continue to go on.

The GSA is releasing their deck at TAGC.  It’s awesome and all attendees will be getting a copy.

Can you tell me about the GSA Model Organisms Deck?

The GSA deck is special because it focuses on experimental narratives, particularly around model organisms. The primary rule set for the Phylo game is based on trophic connections (like a game of dominos, but you connect cards based on food chain considerations). Obviously, you can’t emulate this game mechanic with model organisms eating each other!  So we needed to create a new gameplay and a new set of rules for this deck.

These rules revolve around getting points by finishing your “projects,” which are completed by collecting the appropriate cards (including the organism(s) you’re working on, the methods you need to use, etc).  As this unfolds in the game, there are also cards that make project completion easier or harder—these reflect common occurrences in research culture (such as grant approval, sample contamination, switching projects, etc). You can also collaborate on projects by sharing cards. Definitely kudos to the design team, which was composed of genetics grad students and undergrads, as the gameplay is quite well done!

One of the current buzzwords in education is “game-based learning”—what are the benefits of using gaming in a learning environment?

The academic research that looks at game-based learning is still pretty young, and a bit amorphous to be honest. Most of the research is concerned with digital games, but there’s also growing interest in analog games (such as card games, board games, or tabletop role playing games like the GSA Phylo deck). Generally, the merits of using games lie in enhancing engagement, since concepts of “play” and narrative factor into engagement so strongly. Enhanced engagement can then, in turn, lead to better uptake of prescribed learning objectives.

One of the things that we’re most interested in researching is what happens when students “design” the game themselves. In other words, if you provide students with a framework that asks them to “make a game that somehow includes these learning outcomes” – what then? From our preliminary observations, where the framework suggests the production of an analog game with the prototyping done with paper and pen, it looks like this might work as a great exercise in inquiry-based learning. In their effort to create a game that makes the concepts fit, students end up really diving deep into the content. It’s quite a challenge to develop game mechanics that emulate a scientific concept, but it’s also fun to make a game, so the engagement and effort are still there.

It’s our hope that a game like the GSA  Model Organisms Deck  in Phylo can give teachers a hybrid experience: the deck can be used as an educational resource, as-is; or it can segue into lessons where students need to design modifications (“mods”) or expansion packs to introduce other genetic-themed concepts.

The game has playtested really well, but we’re particularly excited to see what educators can do with it. Phylo is very open to mods, which means that it can be used effectively in an educational space. This is why we’re hosting a few hackathons at the conference. I think with the calibre of folks in the genetics education space, we could come up with some pretty cool mods, and/or lesson plans to go with the game.

You are having a “Collaborative Hackathon” at TAGC—what’s a hackathon??

“Hackathon” typically describes an event where a group of experts converges and collaborates intensively. They are explicitly goal-oriented in that there is something tangible to deliver. Added to that, (and this is where it gets fun) hackathons largely thrive on doing all of this in an insanely short period of time, with lots of juggling of various factors, and with full realization that you have to make do with limited or no resources. Culturally, this is more about sweatpants and copious amounts of caffeine, rather than looking important and taking the expert out for dinner. It’s especially common in the technology sectors, notably in the culture of computer programming where the term “hack” originated—but these days hackathons are widely used in a variety of forms, involving a diverse range of different disciplines. If you can hack computer software, games, science, policy and artistry, why not teaching?

At the TAGC Education Pre-Conference Hackathons, we’ll spend the first 45 minutes focusing on the game: how it came to be, how it plays, and then actually playing with the GSA Model Organisms Phylo deck for a bit. After that, we’ll spend 15 minutes or so showing attendees what other groups and teachers have done with Phylo decks. Finally, everyone will put their pedagogy hats on and think about how they can incorporate the game into common genetics themed learning objectives. This may take the form of a designed lesson plan that asks students to dig a little deeper; it may take the form of thinking of new cards that focus on a particular scientific area (say, an expansion pack);  it may even involve thinking of entirely new games that borrow existing mechanics found in the GSA game.

That’s the beauty of this hackathon: anything goes, but there is the expectation that you will have something to show off. The other beauty, of course, is that it’s perfectly acceptable to fail at your final goal: indeed, in hackathon culture, the element of failure is a key component of this process, because it sets the stage for reiteration.

How can people get their hands on their own GSA Model Organism Phylo deck?
Thanks to Phil Hieter securing sponsorship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Society for Molecular Biosciences, the Michael Smith Laboratories at UBC, and the Rare Diseases: Models and Mechanisms Network, each attendee at The Allied Genetics Conference will receive a “Phylo GSA Starter Deck”—this is the full GSA Model Organism Phylo Deck as well as some blank cards allowing the addition of new organisms, projects, and methods.

For those not attending TAGC, the GSA Model Organisms Deck will also be available online at the Phylo website; people can download the cards and print them for free to make their own decks, or professionally printed decks will be available for (revenue-neutral) purchase.

Hackathon attendees will also get an account on the Phylo website, which will allow them to create DIY cards directly on the site!

Thanks to Dave Ng for spearheading this project and for taking the time to answer our questions. Also, thanks to the students who developed the original concept (Signey Ang, Genevieve Leduc-Robert, Lu Li, and Sam MacKinnon), and all those who have playtested the game. 

• Want to play with the GSA deck and collaborate on new cards, lesson plans, or game mechanics? Email Anne Marie Mahoney and ask to register for the Educator Flexpass, which will give you access to the TAGC Education Pre-Conference. The “Collaborative Hackathon” sessions will be held on Wednesday, July 13, 2016, from 9 am – 12 pm and again from 1 pm – 4 pm.
• We will post a link to the final online version of the GSA Model Organisms Phylo deck here as soon as it is live!

UPDATE: Here is the final deck! You can either download the printable version or buy a high-quality pack at a revenue-neutral price.

The 4th annual USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. attracted more than 365,000 attendees who engaged in over 3,000 hands-on activities. GSA piqued the interest of 5,000 participants by asking them to help choose “America’s Next Top Model Organism” or to build their own Drosophila mutant.  This year, the Top Model Organism was C.elegans, taking the title from Drosophila, who won in 2014. Take a look at some of the fun in the photos below:

GSA would like to acknowledge the efforts of Victoria Scanlon, the outreach intern for the festival.
Special thanks the following people and institutions who made this outreach effort possible:

• Alicia Howard, University of Maryland Baltimore County Department of Biological Sciences
• Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center
• David Eisenmann, University of Maryland Baltimore County Department of Biological Sciences
• Fungal Genetic Stock Center
• Jennifer Loros, Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth University
• Mark Millard, US Department of Agriculture
• Project BioEYES, Carnegie Institution for Science
• Stephen Miller, University of Maryland Baltimore County Department of Biological Sciences
• Theresa Fulton, Institute for Genomic Diversity, Cornell University
• Wormclassroom.org
• Zhongchi Lui, University of Maryland