Tools for Curiosity
Sketching Kits
Engagement
-
How can we attract curiosity? Hands-on experiments may be one of the answers. During the experiment this year, we thought that chromoprotein could be a good choice for visualize science. Hence, we came up with an idea to utilize chromoprotein and E.coli for painting.
-
Design and Development of This Kit
First of all, we needed E.coli to express different chromoprotein, then we chose sfGFP, cj-bule, ts-purple and efoRed as four types of bacteria pigments. Moreover, when it comes to safety issue, we used DH5α this year, for which is no pathogenicity a low concentration.
For a convenient transportation and distribution, a box to content all necessary tools and materials for pupils was taken into consideration. However, get a stock of desirable cases were not that easy. At the beginning, we planned to decorate our cases with our logos, but found they looks not that good meanwhile costing money and time. What’s more, all custom-made cases require a large order quantity. After days of search online, we decided to use the most popular kind – the one that is used for online shopping. Then, we put our stickers onto the top of those cases. To our surprise, it looks professional!
The next consideration is contents of our kits. Firstly, we should have a plate to draw on and culture, so we ordered some disposable culture dish. Then we need pens. Toothpicks, swabs and pipette tips were considered but cannot satisfy our needs and made no sense in normative inoculate procedure. So, we ordered some inoculating loops, also disposable. Hence, major items are prepared!
-
Finished Product
After several group discussions and contacts with suppliers, we finally decided to use corrugated cases as containers, because it is portable and environment-friendly. Besides the pigments, in the box, there’re two drawing board (disposable culture dishes with chloramphenicol add medium), 4 pencils (disposable sterile inoculating loop), a booklet to introduce microorganisms and an instruction with a drawing template (links to supplementary).
Then, here is the Sketching Kit!
Go into Service
How to deal with those kits? Where should they were opened an who should open them? See next Part> The Drawing Class