Yr Eisteddfod

Dw i'n dysgu Cymraeg. I'm a Welsh learner (still making many mistakes). Wythnos diwetha es i i'r Eisteddfod i helpu yn yr Pafiliwn Gwyddoniaeth a Thechnoleg (dydd Gwener i dydd Sul). Last week I went to the Eisteddfod to help in the Science and Technology Pavilion (Friday to Sunday). Mae hi'n fy Eisteddfod gyntaf. It was my first Eisteddfod. Bendigedig! Bydda yn mynd eto blwyddyn nesaf. Fantastic! I'll go again next year.

Playful coding: computing activities for schools

In many schools, computing is a topic that needs more encouragement. The Playful Coding project wants to make practical activities that can be run in schools to explore ideas in computer science. I've just been along to one of their meetings and seen it in action. It was extremely inspiring to be in a room full of people who didn't see running computing engagement activities as a chore, but as fun. They had all put a lot of thought into making fun activities and all wanted to run their activities with the groups of children.
 

It's an EU project involving teachers and university researchers from Spain, Romania, Italy, France and us in Aberystwyth, Wales. Each project partner had developed several activities and the purpose of the meeting was to tested out many of these activities on children and their teachers, and to start to develop a guide for teachers to explain how to use them. Until that guide is produced, you can still browse the activities and have a go with them. Try out for example:

• Collaborative story telling with Scratch, where each team of children makes a 30 second story with a character who moves from the left of the screen to the right. When all laptops are lined up, a character can move through every screen.
• Artificial Intelligence, where children get to think about whether a computer can ever be intelligence, and how would we know if it was?
• Poetry animation with Scratch, where children make characters that act out a poem.

There are lots more activities to choose from. Some just take an hour, some take a day, and some span a term. Some use robots, some use no particular equipment. They can be embedded into other lessons (languages, maths, science, art), or just standalone. And they are adaptable for different age ranges.

To follow the project see the Playful Coding website, follow #playfulcoding on Twitter or find Playful Coding on Facebook.

International Women's Day pub quiz

On Sunday 8th March 2015, Hannah Dee and I organised a pub quiz for International Women's Day. We wanted to highlight some famous women in science, but we don't expect people to know much about famous women in science. So how to do a quiz? We themed 5 rounds around the women:

1) The Mary Anning fossil hunting round
A huge word search with many words related to Mary Anning's work and fossils to find (including "ichtheosaur" and "she sells sea shells", "on the sea shore".

2) The Amelia Earhart aviation round
Create paper aeroplanes that will travel from Europe (over here) to America (over there) and land within an area marked by a hula hoop. We should have had planes crossing the Atlantic in the other direction, but oh well, we're in west Wales.

3) The Caroline Herschel stargazing round
Early astronomy was often about spotting small differences in maps of the heavens. Thanks to heavens-above.com we had a copy of the sky map for the evening, and another copy that had been modified with gimp. Spot the difference! Three Gemini twins?

4) The Barbara McClintock genome round
Here we used C. Titus Brown's shotgunator to make a set of short reads from a few sentences about the work of Barbara McClintock. The teams had to assemble the genome to decipher the sentences. It must have seemed as if transposons were at work, because with a few repeated words the sentences they were constructing did get rather jumbled.



5) The Florence Nightingale data visualisation round
Finally the teams got to use a box of stuff (pipe cleaners, stickers, fluorescent paper, googly eyes, coloured pens) to make the most creative version of this year's HESA stats on women employed in higher education.

The scales of employment in HE

No trivia or celebrities in the quiz at all!

The Genome Game with Countdown and High Score Table

The Genome Game now has a part where you have to guess the rules (correspondence between genotype and phenotype) before the time runs out. If you guess correctly then you get to join the (local storage) high score table. It's also bilingual now, so you can play in the medium of Welsh.

http://genome-game.dcs.aber.ac.uk/game

Western Mail article about bioinformatics

As part of the Welsh Crucible I had an article in the Western Mail today. How computer science can solve problems in biology. We were asked to explain our work in 400-500 words (they chose the title). Much more challenging than I thought it would be, because that's not very many words.

The genome game

We've made an HTML5/Javascript educational game for teaching children about bioinformatics. You can try out the game on our webserver, or download it, fork it and develop it for your own purposes.

The idea is that we have 4 binary digits controlling 4 aspects of a cute creature's phenotype (eye colour, head colour, body colour and number of legs). The binary digits are big clickable buttons, which toggle the bit value and correspondingly change the creature. We can use this initial button-clicking exercise to talk about combinatorics and binary numbers: how many different creatures can be made by changes to 4 bits?

Then we show the underlying rules. These are the equivalent of "if-then-else" rules, defining how the bit values control the phenotype. The rules can be changed, so the children can choose which bit controls which characteristic, and also choose colours and leg numbers.

The genome game at National Science Week

Finally we can "Make population". This creates a random population of 5 creatures, all generated from the current set of rules, and it hides the rules. Now the game is to have a friend who didn't see the rules guess what the underlying rules were. They can see the 5 creatures and the genomes of each creature. Sometimes it's easy to work out the rules, and sometimes the rules can't be completely determined. It depends on the random 5 creatures. Sometimes all the creatures with blue eyes also happen to have 6 legs, and then we just can't tell which of the 4 bits is responsible for which characteristic.

We finish up the discussion by asking how many genes the children think are in baker's yeast (approx 6,000, easy to get hold of a bag of yeast, and they can guess what it is and what it does). They'd guess at "1? 2? 4? millions?" After this we asked them to guess how many genes in a human (approx 20,000). And describe how about 16 genes are actually responsible for your eye colour, not just one. And finally, ask how many genes in wheat (current estimate approx 100,000 or more). The look of astonishment at the complexity of wheat was a common reaction, quickly followed by "Why?". So we tell them that's what scientists are currently trying to find out: what do all our genes or the genes in yeast or wheat actually do? How many representatives of a population would scientists need to determine what the 100,000 genes in wheat do? And we tell them that if they want to work in bioinformatics when they grow up, then they could find out the answers for themselves.

Wheat and yeast: how many genes do they have?

How did this game come about? We have a BBSRC funded project on the application of multi-relational data mining to the problem of finding which parts of an organism's genotype are responsible for its phenotype. This problem is often called GWAS (genome wide association studies) or marker-assisted selective breeding. As part of the application for funding, we said that we'd do some public outreach activities, making a bioinformatics game for children that could be used as part of the Technocamps activities, and represented the research problem that we were working on. The game is obviously a highly simplified view of the research, but still does give an idea of how hard the problem is!

Science galleries

There is a growing awareness that scientists and engineers should be better at communicating their work to the public (and to policy makers). It's not enough just to do good science if no one knows about it.

The excellent Sixty Symbols project has scientists at Nottingham Uni making videos about interesting aspects of physics and astronomy. There are Science Cafes (or Cafe Scientifiques) around the country to chat about science in a mixed audience. As part of our current research project we're going to make an online bioinformatics activity that can be used in schools to teach children about binary numbers, rules and about how genome translates into phenotype. BCS Mid-Wales have recently had two successful show-and-tell events where robots, games, and technology were proudly shown and enjoyed. And we've just had a student develop a fantastic HTML5/Javascript game to demonstrate evolution in partially selfing fish populations (you have to breed a bigger population than your competitors and not get infected).

In every reasonably-sized town there will an art gallery (where the public can go to see art), a museum (where the public can learn about history), and a library (where the public can go to find literature). is there an equivalent for science? There are science museums/education centres in certain towns, but they aren't as widespread as art galleries/museums/libraries by a long way. And they're often aimed at educating children and teenagers rather than aiming at inspiring adults. Art galleries are rarely aimed at children and teenagers.

Here in Aberystwyth we have an Arts Centre with multiple galleries where I can see stunning photography, paintings and prints, Ceredigion museum which shows me what amazing outfits people used to wear when bathing, and how huge telephone cables used to be, and we have more libraries than most towns, including the university libraries, a town library and the National Library of Wales. But we don't have a place I can go on a rainy Saturday afternoon to browse science. I can read about science in the library, but that's not the same thing. I'd like to see Science Galleries in every town.