DDR for DNA – Dancing for Science?

This is very cool. The photo was posted on Matt Hughey’s flickr page called Dance Dance DNA Revolution. Here’s what Matt writes about it… At the Birch Aquarium at Scripps near San Diego, they devote half the space to teaching kids about science. In a wing devoted to explaining gene expression they had some stuff about DNA and the coolest thing was this video game that taught you about building blocks of life, then proceeded to a real DDR game where you have to step to the DNA parts being shown on screen. What is DDR? It stands for Dance Dance Revolution and it’s a video game played on a dance pad. The best part was when one of the 20 amino acids were built, it would say the name. So you’d see A T T G C and so on… and then it would shout “Cysteine!”

Matt says that the learning experience was mostly lost on the kids, who just wanted to play some DDR, but it was a very clever idea. I agree with Matt… my hat’s off to the scientists that came up with this idea.

Here is the Birch Aquarium research site describing the exhibit