http://www.gamesforchange.org/play

NISE has some games about nanotechnology

http://www.nisenet.org/

Science Netlinks has many things for teaching… some are games, some
are not…

http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/resource_index.php

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2001 The Beginning:  Gathering Evidence.

The Federation of American Scientists starting gathering research about how technology could be used to transform education in 2001.  Under the guidance of their new president Henry Kelly, the FAS launched the Learning Science and Technology Research and Development Roadmap project, which brought together approximately 100 researchers from the academic, government and corporate sectors. This extensive collaborative effort was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to FAS-LTP (Grant number 0226421), the Department of Education, as well as the Hewlett Foundation, Microsoft Corporation, and Carnegie Corporation.  The Roadmaps were published in 2003 on the FAS-LTP website.

The collaborative work of the roadmap participants identified key research and development areas for next-generation learning systems; pedagogy and instructional design; building physically correct interactive simulations; dialogue and question management, learner modeling, and tools for assembling and constructing learning systems from these components.  These roadmaps were presented to Congress, and provided the background data for the development of legislation that was passed in 2008 as part of the Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.  This legislation authorizes the establishment of a National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies.   http://www.fas.org/press/faq/nationalcenter.html

Games can teach, we’ll prove it!

FAS began its bold experiment to PROVE that video game could teach and train in 2004. The newly formed FAS-Learning Technologies Program applied for and received three peer-reviewed, federally-funded grants to design and develop learning games.  In addition to Immune Attack, FAS-LTP has also produced a simulation trainer called Multi Casualty Incident Responder and a game called Discover Babylon.  Multi Casualty Incident Responder combines realistic simulations with advanced training technologies to teach firefighters.  Discover Babylon is an immersive 3D game for 8-12 year olds that teaches about the significance of Mesopotamia in world culture using library and museum objects.

Gathering More Evidence.

In October 2005, FAS-LTP convened the Educational Games Summit (www.fas.org/gamesummit) which was the first meeting of government, academia, private foundations and the entertainment software industry to address the challenges of developing, marketing and funding educational games.  The resulting report, www.fas.org/gamesummit/Resources/Summit on Educational Games.pdf summarizes the research about why video games are expected to teach well, and in particular, why complex video games (like Immune Attack) should teach the skills that high wage jobs demand, such as data collection and decision making.  Henry Kelly, President, Federation of American Scientists, as quoted in the Educational Games Summit report, says:

“Game developers have instinctively implemented a lot of the recommendations of learning scientists and used them to help players acquire a skill set that closely matches the kind of thinking, planning, learning, and technical skills that seem to be increasingly demanded in business. In the game world, the measure of a player’s success is complex and practical. Can you use your knowledge? Can you feed your people? Can you cure the patient? Can you beat Dan Snyder at his own football franchise?”

Immune Attack!  2004-2008.

With a competitive grant from the National Science Foundation (Award number 0427827), FAS lead a collaboration with Immunologists at Brown University, with graphic art experts at University of Southern California.  We chose to create a biology game, because of the need to engage more students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) related fields.  We choose immunology because high school teachers indicated that this subject is one of the most difficult to present.

Game development is an iterative process, and scientists, teachers and students all had input.  Garry Gaber, CEO and President of Escape Hatch Entertainment, rose to the challenge.  Escape Hatch provided graphics and game mechanisms in Immune Attack that are not only fun and exciting for students to play, but that have been patiently modeled and re-modeled in response to scientists’ critiques.  This unique interaction requires Mr. Gaber’s personal dedication to the creation of an excellent educational video game, a sense of humor and collaboration on the part of our scientists, and the experience with maintaining unique collaborations that FAS-LTP provides.

Key parts of the game mechanism are that every object in the game functions as it should in nature, except for the fictional, cell sized submarine (called a nanobot) that the player pilots remotely through the body.  In this manner, game actions that are not true to nature are clear, because they involve the nanobot.  Additionally, great care was taken to generate the communication that comes from the game’s “on board advisors” so that it helps the player play the game while always presenting information that is true to science.

Once a working engine, working graphics generation system and storyline had been established, the work of testing Immune Attack with students could begin.  The most important factor in educational game development is, after all, that students should be engaged.  To this end, FAS-LTP spent an entire school year’s time testing the Immune Attack prototypes with students in 5 high school across the country.  After each evaluation with students, their comments and reactions were used to design the next prototype.  Finally a game mechanism and modified story line were finalized that was engaging for students and accurate to the science.

Success!

In May, 2008, the final version of Immune Attack was made available for free download on the FAS website [immuneattack.org].  This version of Immune Attack is a proof of concept, a huge step toward demonstrating that a video game can be made about science.  A video game storyline can be written about cells and proteins that is compelling enough to make students want to play the game.  And importantly, video game action can be created that is true to science.   Now, for the very first time, students can learn about innate immunity painlessly.  Well, not without repeatedly dying virtual deaths in virtual exploding fireballs.  But now immunity, and the cell biology and the protein biochemistry involved in immune reactions are presented to students in an familiar format: the video game.  Information is presented intuitively, players need to accomplish a goal so they seek out the information rather than listen passively, and the constant challenge of beating the game keeps them on task longer than anyone could ever listen to a lecture on innate immunity.  The richness of the video game arena is proven to be an excellent home for the Cellular and Molecular science of the human immune system.

Immune Attack has been downloaded by over 9000 people.  Five hundred teachers have registered with us as interested in evaluating Immune Attack in their classrooms.  Immune Attack is featured on the AAAS website ScienceNetlinks.  Seed magazine wrote an article “Gaming on the Shoulders of Giants” about us.  Nature Medicine featured Immune Attack in an article.  Edutopia has made two videos about McKinley Technology High School students using Immune Attack: these students served as beta testers for Immune Attack from the very beginning.

Immune Attack 2009-2014.

Melanie Stegman, Ph.D. was hired by FAS-LTP in Summer 2008 to be project manager for Immune Attack.  Melanie is leading the evaluation of Immune Attack and the development of Immune Attack 2.0.   To support the evaluation and distribution Immune Attack, much appreciated funding comes from the Entertainment Software Association Foundation, who have been dedicated to Immune Attack for over three years.  In order to develop Immune Attack from a proof of concept into an even more engaging game with ever more science included, Melanie has received a very competitive grant from the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, Grant Number: 1R25AI084848-0110.  Collaborating with FAS_LTP in this work is the Maine International Center for Digital Learning, who helping us greatly with evaluation design.  And EscapeHatch Entertainment, of course, because they are best game designer/programmer ever.

Additionally, Other funding has come to Immune Attack from Amgen Corporation, PHrMA, Verizon Foundation.

Many goals remain to be accomplished.  Most importantly we must evaluate the effect of playing Immune Attack on students knowledge and on their attitudes toward cellular and molecular science.  Evaluations are underway, and any teacher, teaching any subject to 7^th though 12^th grade students is invited to participate in our evaluation. Preliminary data points out that students are learning.  Students who play Immune Attack learn about the functions of Monocytes, about proteins mediating the functions of Monocytes, and about molecular interactions among human complement factors, bacterial surface proteins and how cytokines are produced and what effect those cytokines have on white blood cells and vein endothelial cells.  Most promising is our preliminary data that students are gaining confidence with molecular and cellular biology.

Our preliminary data is so promising that the American Society of Cell Biology decided to put our abstract in their Press Book.  Our evaluations have been small scale so far, but we hope that in the next 4 months that we will be able to get about 20-30 teachers to evaluate Immune Attack in their classrooms.  The evaluation requires three 40-minute sessions in an online computer lab.  Computers need 2GHz processors and 1 GB of ram, a video card 64 MB or better and and must be running Windows XP, Vista or 7.

Scientists, we need you!

In order to develop new game levels that are full of exciting game play we need intricate molecular details about chemistry, physics, chemical engineering, nanotechnology, biochemistry, immunology and cell biology.  We have 20 dedicated scientists already serving on our Scientific Advisory Group.  Acting as a board of reviewers, these scientists keep Immune Attack accurate by “peer reviewing” the game.  There enthusiasm and expert assistance will keep Immune Attack an exciting true to life adventure!

If you would like to serve on the Scientific Advisory Group, or as an advisor as a teacher, please contact us at immuneattack at fas.org.  We are having a great time presenting real cellular and molecular science to the public and we welcome you!

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You can listen to the interview on NPR’s website. At the beginning of the interview, E. O. Wilson says that games are the future of education.  He says that gaming allows us to learn the way that we evolved to learn: by doing.

Who is Dr. Wilson?
From NPR site:
“Biologist E. O. Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, is a two-time Pulitzer-winning ant expert who helped develop theories of island biogeography, chemical ecology, and sociobiology. A leader in the modern environmental movement, Wilson has devoted his life to understanding how all forms of life are connected.”

Who is Will Wright?
Have you heard of the video game, The Sims? Well, before the Sims, Will Wright created a game SimAnt, in 1991. And according to his story on NPR this morning, Will used Dr. Wilson’s work on ants to create the scientifically accurate game SimAnt.

Here we have another argument in favor of teaching using games. Games allow us to Do Things. FAS has long held this position, and we are always happy to hear when others say so, too.

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Well, this summer at McKinley Tech kids made games about gene regulation and inter neuronal signaling.  And the 3D Models they made are of Neurons, their Myelin sheath and of motor proteins carrying their cargo to the end of axons.  Not what you expected, is it?

Immune Attack can teach players about the molecular processes in the game.  But Immune Attack also inspires students to make their own game.

When I go over to McKinley Tech to talk to the students, I usually find fun looking images on their computer desktop backgrounds.  Popular singers, movies, and animation characters all show up on the computers… but this summer, on my third visit, I noticed that one of the desktop background images was changed to a really neat image taken with a scanning electron microscope of an artery full of red blood cells.

I went to McKinley 4 times this summer, once a week. I gave an initial 30 minute introduction into basic neurology (really basic, I mean I’m a biochemist, not a neuologist.)   I explained the was ion channels allow an electrical impulse to travel from the cell body to the end of the axon.  I explained how Myelin helps speed the electrical impulse.  I explained that receptors on the cell body receive chemical signals and certain combinations of those signals can cause the electrical impulse to start.   And I explained how some chemical signals cause a signal inside the cell that sends in turn another signal to alter gene expression.  Yes, that is right: I explained a LOT more molecular biology than High School sophomores ever learn.

But these kids we not learning biology, they were learning how to listen to a “subject matter expert” and how to design a video game based on what she says. While I talked their eyes darted about and I could see creative sparks all around. After my presentation I fielded questions for 30 more minutes.

Each time I returned to McKinley, I fielded another 20 minutes of intense questions from each of 4 groups of Game Maker students. The 3D modeling students, who are using Maya, asked many questions, too. But their models clearly showed that they had done a lot of excellent research independently.

Here is the story that eSchool News wrote about our four week project:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=60054

And finally, I need to thank Dr. Kevin Clark, professor in the George Mason University Instructional Technology, and Mr. Rick Kelsey STEM coordinator of McKinley Tech for inviting me to participate in their summer technology program.

If you are interested in having your students create video games about molecular biology, contact me.  Creating a learning is an objective that requires much learning and makes it fun at the same time.

The games and the moels that the McKinley students made will be posted soon!

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You can contribute your own video to us, and also watch for the next Hotchalk/FAS Virtual Science Fair!

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The McKinley students answered with questions of their own, ones that had never crossed my mind:  “How will we control the Nanobot from outside the body?”  “What kind of motor will it have?”   Certainly a miniature motor or even a radio transmitter will not fit into a 50 micrometer box.  A Nanobot must truly be impossible.

We made a list of questions, small, easy to focus on.
1.  How much pressure is in arteries?  In veins?
2.  How much pressure can Titanium withstand?
3.  How much pressure can Aluminum withstand?
4.  How much pressure can Nanotubes withstand?

The goals were simple, write a 3 sentence report with 2 references.  The first reference could be Wikipedia, the second reference should be from a peer reviewed paper, or from the website of a professor at a university.

This one day’s experiment was successful.  The students were focused on their tasks, as the questions were not too difficult but still very interesting.  I never did get the actual repots from Mr. Leslie, but we have plans to create similar class experiences for this coming school year.

After we release Immune Attack 3.0 in October, 2009, I plan to encourage students from all over to submit these 3 sentence reports to our online Mission Intelligence database.  Students, teachers and scientists can vote for the database entries that they like.  We incorporate the best into the Mission Intelligence Database for Immune Attack 3.0.

If any teacher is interested in discussing this with us, please reply below, or email me at mstegman at fas dot org.

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OK.  So why is a scientist at the National Human Genome Research Institute doing research on bacteria?  Good question.  The answer is that there are so many bacteria living on us and inside of us, that the bacteria affect our bodies a great deal!  The bacteria eat and produce waste inside us and on our skin, they interact with our immune cells and our intestines.  Just like we have an extensive amount of cell to cell communication among the cells of our body, so are there extensive amounts of communication between bacteria and the cell of our body.  Sometimes bacteria alter the behavior of the cells of our body, in ways we used to think were only human-human cell interactions.   Additionally, the kind of bacteria that live in and on me may be different from the bacteria that live on someone else.  Could that make a difference?  It very well could!  Obesity or Crohn’s disease may be related to the bacteria in our gut.

First things first, how many bacteria live on us?  And how many different kinds of bacteria live on us?  Dr. Bonnie Bassler, of Princeton University, gives an estimate of these in her Ted talk, at the 2009 TED Conference.  Watch 0:55 through 2:30.  (The whole talk is fantastic, too!)   Number of human cells in the average adult = 1 trillion.  Number of bacteria cells in association with the average adult = 10 trillion.  Even more intriguing, is the number of genes that humans have is about 30,000.  How many different bacteria genes are associated with us?  300,000!

Link to Bonnie Bassler, PhD’s talk at the 2009 TED Conference.

OK, so there are SIGNIFICANT amounts of bacteria on our bodies, enough to affect us.  What are we going to do about it?  Well, we could follow the lead of scientists like Bonnie and Julia and start thinking of our associated bacteria genomes as part of our own!  And that means, of course, that we need to study them as much as we study ourselves.  And this is exactly what Julia Segre’s lab did.  Elizabeth Grice, Ph.D., is the first author of the paper, and she is the post doc in Dr. Julia Segre’s lab who lead the work of the paper.  Dr. Grice sampled 20 different locations on 10 different people, and found out which different kinds of organisms live in each spot.  Each location on our body provides a different climate.  Just like plants on the Earth, different bacteria grow better in a dry environment, while others grow better in a wet environment.  Elizabeth Grice, Ph.D. and her colleagues are out to find out who lives where.  This is basic research.  We don’t know yet how valuable this information will be.  But on Dr. Segre’s website you can see her research is clearly linked to disease and how to prevent it!

For an excellent, and easy to read, write up of Dr. Grice’s paper, you can go to an excellent science blog written by Ed Yong, “Not Exactly Rocket Science.“  Here is the NIH’s press release about the paper.

I hope this entry and links helps present the ideas of the world of bacteria, how much smaller and more numerous they are than us, as well as the idea that the things that that occur on the cellular level have big impact in our lives.

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The ability to convey scientific concepts in an engaging way is important. Our society and government, every company and every family must address problems of molecular science every day… No, really, we do! How does chemical pollution kill animals? Why is heating food in a microwave bad for us? No one wants to hurt the environment or eat harmful food. But who knows what the data is and who knows how to interpret it? And who can explain it to me, my grandmother, and my congressman so that we can all make smart decisions about recycling, plastics, cooking, whether to use detergents… etc?

Who will explain the science of tomorrow to us? It will be the students of today. And we, at The Federation of American Scientists and at Hotchalk, are happy to have an opportunity to train the science interpreters of tomorrow. The Virtual Science Fair requires students to make a 4 minute video in which they explain a scientific concept of their choice. The video format may be 1) a recording of a particular experiment that the students designed and performed, 2) a song/poem/performance art, or 3) a computer generated/photographic video with no actors. Each video must address all aspects of a scientific presentation: Background and significance, Choice of methods, Experimental procedures, Analysis of results, and Discussion of the relevance of the results.

Watch the winning videos and see for yourself how a few high school students.

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The first topic is Nanotechnology.

The Nanobot in our game, Immune Attack is constructed of so far unspecified materials.   For Immune Attack 2.0, we would like to specify how our Nanobot is constructed.  We are currently working with McKinley Technology High School engineering students to answer some basic questions.  So far I have asked the students, what material could we use to build a submarine that is a the size of a cell?  How much pressure would it be able to withstand?  And could we build a “ray gun” that is this small?

National Geographic article about Nanotechnology

POLICY about Nanotechnology.

Here is the summary of a talk that was given recently on concerns about nanotechnology and what kinds of concerns we should have about constructing things that are so small that our cells can absorb them.

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/0310nano.shtml

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