CRISPEE is the result of an NSF-funded project from the Human-Computer Lab at Wellesley College, in collaboration with the Developmental Technology Research Group at Tufts University. This paper goes into more detail about the design process and technical implementation of CRISPEE.
Through playful interaction with CRISPEE, along with a curriculum in an informal learning environment, young children are introduced to the basics of problem-solving with genetic engineering. The form of CRISPEE combines the shape and function of existing laboratory equipment with materials commonly found in children's toys, such as wood, felt, and Velcro.
CRISPEE was intentionally designed to be simple and inexpensive to manufacture, to make it accessible to all children. It runs off an Arduino Uno and features arcade buttons, conductive velcro, NeoPixels, and pressure sensors. It was manufactured using a laser cutter with materials easily found at a hardware store.
CRISPEE underwent three iterations and was developed through collaboration with teachers and other early childhood educators, with multiple rounds of testing in multi-day bioengineering camps and an exhibit at the Boston Children's Museum. It has been featured in numerous peer-reviewed journals and presented at conferences.
BacToMars is the result of an NSF-funded project from the Human-Computer Lab at Wellesley College, in collaboration with the Developmental Technology Research Group at Tufts University.
BacToMars is a computer game based off of BacPack for New Frontiers, a large multi-touch museum exhibit. In the game, players help a team of astronauts survive on and escape from Mars by bioengineering bacteria that can use resources on Mars (e.g. soil, poop, carbon dioxide) to create essential products (e.g. water, oxygen, biomatter). The game features scaffolding to assist players in learning the interface and the game mechanics, and can be played as single-player or multi-player.
Curricular elements were developed to further enhance learning, including short educational videos and minigames.
BacToMars went through multiple rounds of testing with children, and has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and presented at conferences.
Personal Genomics for Human-Computer Interaction (PGHCI) is an NSF-funded project, paired with the Human Genome Project, that seeks to facilitate non-expert users to interact with their genetic data, and compare that data with others.
The explosion of personal genetic testing from companies such as 23andMe has led more people than ever to have access to their genetic data, but for non-experts, making meaning of this data can be challenging. PGHCI provides interactive visualization tools to filter, sort, and compare data with family members or friends.
These tools were developed over multiple rounds of iterative testing with hundreds of users on Mechanical Turk. By analyzing user metrics data and comprehension of the genetic data, we were able to improve the visualizations to make them even more accessible to non-experts. The visualizations have since been published on Open Humans, a citizen science website.
I spent most of my time as a chemistry major working in the astrochemistry lab under Dr. Christopher Arumainayagam. This research studied how cosmic radiation bombarding thin ices on deep-space dust granules causes streams of low-energy secondary electrons to interact with molecules of ammonia, water, and carbon dioxide. These secondary electrons caused these molecules to form radicals; radical-radical interactions have no activation energy, and thus, these molecular building blocks were capable of undergoing chemical reactions at incredibly low temperatures. We were looking for the formation of pre-cursors to amino acids - as much of the water on our planet is theorized to come from comets, which pick up water from these dust granules in dark dense molecular clouds, these precursors to amino acids could have greatly contributed to the origins of life on our planet.
A large part of my job in the lab involved wrangling the ultrahigh vacuum chamber, a beast of a machine that allowed us to reach pressures below 10^-10 Torr and temperatures of 77 K, simulating dark, dense molecular clouds in deep space. Using a small, molybdenum(110) single crystal, we were able to form thin ices (10-1000 molecular layers), bombard the ice with low-energy electrons (10-1000 eV), and measure the resulting reactions with a quadrupole mass spectrometer.
The ultrahigh vacuum chamber was older than I am, and needed extensive repairs throughout my time in the lab. One summer of research was spent diagnosing issues with our results. Each time we opened the chamber to try a solution, we needed to wait 5 days to get down to adequately low pressures to test our solution. The final diagnosis came down to a loose copper wire which was shorting a thermocouple.
As chemistry is no longer my career focus, and it's been many years since this research, I am fuzzy on many of the finer details of this research. However, my time in the lab taught me systematic troubleshooting, rigorous data collection, and data analysis. It also left me with a beautiful lens through which to observe the world around me.