Serious Games for Bioinformatics Education Benjamin Good The

Serious Games for Bioinformatics Education Benjamin Good The Scripps Research Institute @bgood

Why games? Attention!!!

Attention is useful for: 1. Recruiting • getting their attention 2. Engaging • holding their attention

Recruiting bioinformaticians “We're hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it's done by” Zoran Popović University of Washington Foldit, a game for protein folding

Foldit players come from many backgrounds Top 50 players Busn/finance/legal largest group. . Majority have no training in biochemistry Cooper, Seth, et al. "Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game. " Nature 466. 7307 (2010): 756 -760.

Teaching with games “The use of educational games within learning environments raises motivation, increases interest in the subject matter, intensifies information retention, encourages collaboration, and improves problem-solving skills. ” Schneider, Maria Victoria, and Rafael C. Jimenez. "Teaching the fundamentals of biological data integration using classroom games. " PLo. S computational biology 8. 12 (2012) Quoting: Michael D, Chen S (2006) Serious games: games that educate, train and inform. Boston: Thomson Course Technology. ”

Games can be used to teach High school students First person shooter game Significantly improves understanding of concepts in immunology Immune Attack http: //Immune. Defense. Game. com Stegman, Melanie. "Immune Attack players perform better on a test of cellular immunology and self confidence than their classmates who play a control video game. " Faraday Discuss 169 (2014): 1 -20.

Finding educational bioinformatics games…

Educational games Game Purpose The DAS game Teaching data integration in bioinformatics (in person, not online) The Bioinformatics Game Introducing protein sequence and structure (mobile) 4 bases Introduce DNA sequencing (mobile) MAX 5 Introduction to sequence comparisons with BLAST, concepts in distributed computing. High school.

TBG – select a protein

TBG: fly around to hit the next amino acid on your list

4 bases (Rostlab, masters thesis) Click the next base in time as the sequence scrolls by. Introduces concept of DNA sequencing Click next base

MAX 5 Goal: introduce the concepts and purposes of DNA sequence comparisons (BLAST) and distributed computing to high school students First person game set in 3 -d world beset by an influenza pandemic. http: //gamestem. com/portfolio/max 5 -storyline-1/ Perry, Daniel, et al. "Human centered game design for bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure learning. " Proceedings of the Conference on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment: Gateway to Discovery. ACM, 2013.

MAX 5 starting screen 1

MAX 5 starting screen 2

MAX 5 “blasting” to detect what a sample is infected with

MAX 5 BLAST analysis

MAX 5 alignment viewer

MAX 5 sample hunting

MAX 5 parallel computing

MAX 5, TBG, 4 Bases, … Plusses Useful introductions. Useful for recruiting. Minuses Very high-level – shallow learning.

Bioinformatics education games Game Purpose Foldit Protein folding Phylo, Fraxinus Multiple Sequence Alignment Ete. RNA structure design Eye. Wire Neuron image tracing Malaria. Spot, MOLT Blood cell phenotyping Dizeez Gene-disease annotation Genes in Space Copy Number Variation detection The Cure Biomarker selection for breast cancer survival prediction • All examples of gamifying tasks in bioinformatics. • None built for the purpose of education!

Genes in Space Fly a spaceship (oh by the way you are helping cancer research) 300, 000 downloads 3 months. . Cancer UK project.

The Cure game Opponents hand Alternate turns picking a gene from a “board” of 25 Your hand

Classroom uses The Cure story (Antoine Taly) http: //tinyurl. com/talycure Goal: understand the concept of Biomarkers 1. Watch short video 2. Play The Cure game (involves picking genes useful for predicting breast cancer survival) 3. Create custom predictive decision tree 4. Write essay about what you did

“Game” Soccer Angry Birds Chess Poker World of Warcraft Doom Halo Pacman Super Mario Brothers The Sims The Game of Life Spore Monopoly Civilization

Game: defining traits 1. A goal 2. Rules 3. Feedback system 4. Voluntary participation Mc. Gonigal J. Reality is broken : why games make us better and how they can change the world. New York: Penguin

Games…? Running – no Nike+ Fuelband – yes Answering questions about programming – no Stackoverflow – yes Programming – no Top. Coder. com – yes 1. A goal 2. Rules 3. Feedback system 4. Voluntary participation

Gamification Google: “the application of typical elements of game playing to other areas of activity…”

Gamified education. Sort of games… Gamified learning environment Purpose CACAO Teach Gene Ontology annotation. Collect new annotations. Undergraduate. Rosalind. info Teaching bioinformatics algorithms ranging from DNA>Amino Acid translation to genome assembly

CACAO Rules • Students form teams • In each of a series of “innings”: 1. They are presented with (or find themselves) lists of proteins 2. They look up articles about them and try to create GO annotations. 3. The team gets points for complete, correct annotations 4. At the end of the inning they can “challenge” the annotations of other teams and steal their points. (Like Scrabble!!) Jim Hu, Texas A&M (TAMU) http: //gonuts. tamu. edu/wiki/index. php/Cacao_rules

CACAO participation Since 2010, 1000+ students 15 universities 2, 800+ new, acceptable annotations No empirical evidence that gamification helps, but anecdotally everyone likes it. . Example teams from 2013

Rosalind. info Rosalind is a platform for learning bioinformatics and programming through problem solving. Python Village (learn programming) Bioinformatics Armory (learn tools) Bioinformatics Stronghold (learn algorithms) Textbook exercises

“Storm the bioinformatics stronghold now!”

Problems: 228 (total), users: 18194, attempts: 296869, correct: 172873

Rosalind user profile

Rosalind leaderboard

Cost $$ Use of games/gamification in bioinformatics education Expressivity: Number and depth of learnable concepts Classroom Lecture course: Typically no game elements Gamified: badges, leaderboards, levels Rosalind. info Holy Grail ? Game: you “play it”, learning more implicit, purposes aside from education CACAO The Cure Foldit Ete. RNA Phylo Max 5 Genes in Space Cost $$ Fun Benefits: recruiting, engagement

Future Directions Slowly pushing towards the holy grail(s) Example: ‘Cyclo 6’ will attempt to teach advanced organic chemistry – to be released on the app store this fall. Removing boundaries that divide scientific games from each other and from other games Genes in Space team – integration directly inside the context of “The Impossible Line” by Chilingo Yako. io

http: //yako. io System for teachers to create lessons that move students through specified levels of multiple games. Jerome Waldispuhl, Mc. Gill University, Phylo

Acknowledgements Jerome Waldispuhl (Phylo) Daniel Perry (MAX 5) Antoine Taly (pioneering the use of games (Foldit, Phylo, The Cure) in his courses) Julia Winter (Cyclo 6) Andrew Su Jim Hu (CACAO) Melanie Stegman http: //www. sciencegamecenter. org http: //Immune. Defense. Game. com Funding

Heroic Purpose Biology and medicine provide a heroic purpose – not unlike the more standard purpose of saving the world from aliens. There are great games to be made and great bioinformaticians to be discovered! BIOINFORMATICIAN

Finding educational bioinformatics games http: //www. sciencegamecenter. org/ Lists about 95 games related to science 57 are tagged with “biology” 2 with “computer science” None focus on bioinformatics learning objectives. Melanie Stegman Federation of American Scientists

Fun Google define: fun “enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure” “Fun” from game design guru Raph Koster “the act of mastering a problem mentally” “the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes” “fun is about learning in a context where there is no pressure, and that is why games matter”