Phase 1 Vision

Phase 1

The focus of Phase 1 is on developing BioArtBot as an educational platform that encourages students to learn by making bio-art. However, development should be done such that later rounds of development could expand to work with arbitrary biology lab work.

Process

The pilot process worked as follows:

1. User designs art with interface at bioartbot.org
2. Lab operator cultures color-producing E.coli in liquid medium
3. Lab operator "prints" a batch of user-submitted art on liquid handling robot and incubates for 48hrs
4. Resulting bio-art is photographed, and the photos are sent to the original user

Phase 1 will adapt the pilot process for the classroom, which ends with a nice photo of the bio-art being sent to the original submitter. The Phase 1 educational kit version will offer some flexibility on next steps. In the most basic form, in addition to receiving a photo souvenir, the student will also be presented with learning materials encouraging the student to think critically about how their artwork was produced. An example discussion topic might be “Why do the different strains make different colors, and how might one get a new color?” For a more advanced curriculum, the kit will ask the student, having seen the results of their work, to follow one of several guided modules to introduce a new technique to their bio-art. Modules will take the form of a written guide with pictures, following the formal example of Kuldell, et al.’s BioBuilder projects. Each module will focus on one of the synbio core competencies that BioArtBot emphasizes - microbiology, robotics, and software engineering. Because the project uses an entirely open-source stack, an advanced student may explore even further techniques and could then share them with classmates or back to the project’s main code repository.

Packaging

The kit is envisioned to be affordable to deploy and only require a single operator, and thus be implementable by post-secondary and some secondary institutions. These institutions could then use their local cloud lab instance to run an introductory biology lab. Additionally, because of the remote nature of the lab, it would be possible to share lab time with other institutions that have not implemented a cloud lab, or collaborate with another cloud lab instance to increase capacity temporarily.

Additional fun features are encouraged, but must not over-complicate the codebase or user experience.

Objectives

Phase 1 development is oriented around the following broad tasks:

• Design and implement the overall workflow for educational use, including login and scheduling tools
• Optimize the bioartbot.org codebase for deployability and ease of understanding by students
• Further standardize the microbial growth and inoculation process such that it can be executed cost-efficiently by someone with minimal training
• Create learning materials that leverage the cloud lab architecture and adapt the BioArtBot codebase to work with them
• Enhance the project with additional telepresence features, such as immediate response from the robot and time-lapse growth of art