Project Details

Organisation:	Science Centre Singapore, DNA Lab
Mentor:	Ms Florence Francis
Members:	Janice, Junxiang, Atiqah! (: (Group 1)
Project Title:	Virus Outbreak!

A. Brief Description of Project

Goal:

1. To create a virus public workshop revolving around Dengue and on the sidelines, Chikungunya and Malaria for students between ages 12-15.
2. To do up a virus gallery trail for JC students to complete when they walk through the virus gallery (open-ended questions) & also a gallery trail for the public (crossword puzzle).

B. Results

What we did:

• Created a virus workshop including activities such as:

- Memory game (To have knowledge of the breeding sites of Mosquitoes)
- Symptoms Checklist (To recognize the symptoms of Dengue & Chikungunya)
- Gel-Electrophoresis (A simplified version of the RT-PCR test that doctors use in real life to confirm dengue suspect cases)
- Dengue Virus Model-Making (To understand the structure of the virus)
- Quiz (To apply their knowledge learnt and clear up misconceptions)

• Facilitated in a number of their workshops available - helping students (from various primary & secondary schools) doing wet-lab activities

• General research on viruses

• Helped out in the virus exhibition opening ceremony - by packing Adenovirus model packs, creating the Adenovirus models and interacting with the public.

• Carry out wet-lab activities - such as the Alu Polymorphism, DNA extraction, Gel-electrophoresis, Bacteria Transformation, etc.

• Walked through the virus exhibitions to come up with 2 gallery activity trails - 1 for JC students (open-ended questions) & 1 for the public (crossword puzzles)

• Table of differences - see below

DENGUE, CHIKUNGUNYA & MALARIA

	Dengue	Chikungunya	Malaria
Culprit	Flavivirus	Alphavirus	Plasmodium parasite
Structure of Virus	Enveloped, positive sense single-stranded RNA	Enveloped, single-stranded positive sense RNA	Unicellular microbes with membrane-bound nucleus
Shape of virus	Icosohedral nucleocapsid	Isometric nucleocapsid	Ring-shaped
Transmission	Aedes mosquito bite	Aedes mosquito bite	Anopheles mosquito bite
Target Area	Blood	Blood	Blood
How virus get into human body	Virus enters the bloodstream when the infected Aedes mosquito bites a human	Virus enters the bloodstream when the infected Aedes mosquito bites a human	Plasmodium parasite is injected into humans when the female Anopheles mosquito bites, and this parasite enters the bloodstream and targets the liver and multiplies in the liver cells. These new parasites burst out of liver cells, entering the bloodstream, infecting and destroying the red blood cells.
Symptoms	Fever, headaches, joint and muscular pains, rashes, leucopenia (decrease in white blood cells), diarrhea	Fever, headaches, joint and muscular pains, fatigue, nausea, vomiting and rashes, decrease in number of platelets	Fever, chills, headache, sweats, fatigue, body aches, mild jaundice, nausea and vomiting
Cure	-->	None. Depends solely on your immune system.	<--
Treatment	Sufficient hydration by intake of fluids, bed rest	No specific treatment, bed rest, fluid replacement	Due to different malaria types, different drugs must be prescribed specifically as some types are resistant to certain medicines.
Avoid	Aspirin, Non-Steroidal Anti-inflammatory drugs or any other medication which reduces the number of platelets or increases tendency to bleed	Aspirin, Non-Steroidal Anti-inflammatory drugs	Aspirin

C. Reflection


Significant Learning Points:

From coming up with the workshop:


- Presentation skills
- Creativity, thinking out of the box
- Cooperation skills between group members
- Analytic skills
- The know-how of coming up with a workshop = Various ideas not accepted at first; Don’t give up; Instead, think of better ideas and how to improve.
- General structure of viruses (trust me, we learnt a lot!)

From doing the other things beside coming up with the workshop:


- Knowing how to facilitate a workshop by communicating with students from various age groups.

- Wet-lab activities such as Alu Polymorphism, DNA extraction, Gel-electrophoresis, Bacteria Transformation etc. We learnt how to handle the apparatus properly and also did some experiments which were new and interesting to us - Alu Polymorphism!

- Interaction with general public

- To always have a positive attitude towards this attachment - it’s up to us to make the most out of it. When you possess a positive attitude, you will always see the positive aspect of work, have fun and not view the workload as a burden or as a must-do but as something that you can learn and gain from.

- Also, when you have a positive attitude towards the attachment, you do not care if it is going to be graded or not, but you will just do it out of fun and interest.

Two interesting aspects about our learning

1. we got to carry out wet lab activities, using sophisticated equipment for activities such as alu polymorphism which enabled us to identify the presence of alu genes in our body

2. As we were working on the virus workshop, there was a Chikungunya virus outbreak in Singapore at the same time. So while it was a virus new to us, we were researching on it to integrate it into our workshop and thus got to learn first hand about the virus too.

One take-away for life

1. To accept rejections and continue working hard with a positive attitude even if it seems that there is no way to improve our ideas because if we try hard enough, we won't be stuck at square one for too long.

Gallery (PICTURES!)