Education
The Workshops
Virus Factory in Schools began as part of the Zooniverse in Schools programme. In this programme, over 600 primary school students received workshops based on the Science Scribbler: Virus Factory project. The workshops were delivered by a Physics Engagement Officer.
When the programme finished, we turned the materials into a “Teacher Resource Pack” so that anyone could deliver the workshops without needing an external facilitator. This became “Virus Factory in Schools” as we know it, and all the materials needed to deliver these workshops were published on Zenodo, with extra information and resources on the Virus Factory in Schools page on the Rosalind Franklin Institute website.
Here are some useful links that you will need during the workshops for the Virus Factory project. If you want to help out the scientists even more, you can come back to this project after the session with your class to do more classifications, or explore the data visualisation in more detail.
Data Visualisation
As part of each workshop, we are going to have a look at the images you have classified and take a look at this data using a specially built app. In order to do this, you first need to open up this app and enter the workflow ID for the project you want to work on before doing any classifications!
You can find the Zoonotes app here. Feel free to explore this more by yourself too! The workflow ID's are listed below:
- Virus Picker - 16156
- Virus Classifier - 16190
Teacher and Student Surveys
Thank you for taking part in our programme bringing real science research into your classrooms! Your feedback is critical to allow us to evaluate our resource, and secure funding to provide these educational materials and activities for free.
We would love to hear what you thought of the sessions - the good, and the bad! Your input will help us make these activities even better, so we really appreciate your help. We have a teacher feedback form to complete here:
We would also appreciate if you could collect feedback from your students. You can find the pre- and post-workshop student surveys in the links below:
If you'd prefer to collect your students feedback in person, we would appreciate if you could collate their responses and share them with the Science Scribbler team.
More Science!
If you would like to read more about some of the science involved in this project, check out the sections below!
How do we take images of cells in 3D?
Electron Tomography is a technique that allows us to collect many different tilted images of the same sample and then later piece everything back together into a 3D volume. This important technique gives us a more life-like picture of what things looks like, even very small things like viruses inside of a cell. We're using this technique at very cold temperatures with the help of the cryogen liquid nitrogen. For more information about tomography, watch the video below!
Before the data can be collected using cryo electron tomography, we had to prepare these cells by first freezing them and then using another technique called Focused Ion Beam Milling or FIB Milling for short. This technique uses an ion beam to remove parts of the cell that we're not interested in imaging, leaving only a small slab of the cell that we're interested in. This slab has to be really thin, otherwise we couldn't use electron tomography to see through it. All of this is done at very cold temperatures using liquid nitrogen!
Here's a picture describing the whole process of preparing the cells: freezing them (in liquid ethane) and then milling them using the FIB to leave just a thin slab (lamella).
The idea of Subjectivity
When we look at an image, we will each see slightly different things stand out to us, and we will think slightly different things about what we see. Similarly, when we read something, we will take away and think slightly different things about what we have read. This is the idea of subjectivity.
When you are doing one of the activities in this project, you might see a slightly different number of viruses in an image, for example, than the person sat next to you. This is absolutely fine! In this type of research, there isn't necessarily one right or wrong answer, which is why we need your help to look at these images and locate and classify these viruses!
Here you can watch the Virus Factory team play a short game to explore this idea of subjectivity: