Open hardware is an emerging approach to address challenging community-level problems for biological research and other applications. Open hardware allows users to gain access to powerful technologies through sharing mechanisms that enable individual contributions to facilitate community-scale improvements that would rarely be achieved through traditional proprietary mechanisms. These advantages have fueled the development of open-hardware approaches to support germplasm cryopreservation and repository establishment. For distributed systems such as these to function, community development is extremely important to recruit and advance participation through individual roles including users, makers, and developers of technology. As such, participation is the core driving force for success of open-hardware systems.
Interaction with individuals through training and workshops is traditionally used to support community development. These interactions are often performed as lectures, questions by audiences, and answers by hosts. However, these methods can lose interest and attention because of a lack of excitement and active interaction, especially in the ‘Zoom Era’, when hands-on activities are limited. We have developed and tested various alternative activities for community interaction, such as hierarchical thinking, show-and-tell, roleplaying, and game structures. Our goal is to promote active application of open hardware for cryopreservation and germplasm repository development in aquatic species. A ‘Cryo-Jeopardy’ (Figure 1) game was developed and tested within our group (alpha testing) as a learning tool to engage active thinking and maximize attention, and is available for beta-testing by outside audiences. This game includes several categories of questions. Scores are registered as temperatures associated with different difficulties of questions. The questions were designed to be fun while facilitating interaction and higher-level thinking beyond basic knowledge. Additional information is also delivered through the answers. Negative temperatures are awarded when questions are answered correctly, and positive temperatures for answering incorrectly. The team that reaches -80 °C (a common endpoint prior to storage in liquid nitrogen) wins (Figure 1). This tool was developed for open hardware, but could be adopted by general outreach and educational programs.