Forum:Science Games For Citizen Science And Educational Purposes

Question

[Mary]

I was hoping this piece would get picked up in the planet feed, but it didn't, so I'll bring it here.

There's a site that is eager for science educational games. I know that's of interest to some of the folks who post at BioStar, and some people here are developing games. So I wanted to raise awareness of the opportunity to post your games over there. I asked them specifically if the wanted all levels of games--not just 4th graders--and they said yes.

Here's more detail on the ScienceGamesCenter site: Video Tip of the Week: ScienceGameCenter. They are also interested in science game development as an educational opportunity. And they are eager to have science folks and teachers review the games for guidance that can help users decide on games and features.

(I have no relationship with the ScienceGameCenter project--I just liked the outreach and educational opportunity they are developing.)

Answer 1

[Josh Herr]

I think this is a great idea. I had grand plans years ago to attempt to develop a "tetris" type game that people could play that would "manually" inspect and test aligners for genome alignment projects, but I have no idea how to even begin to develop a game. Perhaps someone already has done this now. For a project/game related to bioinformatics, Fold It is probably the best example I know of. Another cool, but different example is the SETI screensaver which takes advantage of down computer time.

I think these are great ideas, even some opportunities that could acquire funding attention from agencies and possibly some development backing from gaming companies. The best games could be both educational about bioinformatics but also fun to play, an added bonus would be to develop ways to address problems or "consensus checks" on computational alignments. Any other ideas?

[Yannick Wurm]

Hi Mary & Josh, it is excellent that this type of awareness is growing. We actually got some funding to develop a game that aims to crowd-source gene model refinement (as initially asked here: Crowdsourcing Game - Manual Annotation )... The project is still young but we'll soon want input from outside contributors. Cheers, yannick

[Andrew Su]

Josh, your alignment game sounds like phylo http://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/

[Josh Herr]

Yes, someone told me about this, but I couldn't find it when I searched. It's way better than anything I could ever have come up with; I just always thought that making a game out of manually aligning rough sections of a computational alignment would make it more enjoyable. Glad someone did this. Thanks for the link!

[Mary]

I think it's good for the field to get more non-science folks engaged and become fans of science and technology too. Helping teachers to get good stuff to young students will matter in the long run as well.