science game lab

Benjamin Goodbgood@scripps.edu@bgoodsciencegamelab.org/beta.php

Science Game Lab

Outline

• Why? • Goals of SGL• Current state• Partnership with Wikipathways• Next steps

Problems

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1000000 Render knowledge contained in more than 1 million articles per year computable.

Design RNA molecules Fold proteins Align multiple DNA sequences Map connectivity of neurons in

the brain Improve science education… … more

Each of these problems can benefit from “Human Computation”

Render knowledge contained in more than 1 million articles per year computable.

Design RNA molecules Fold proteins Align multiple DNA sequences Map connectivity of neurons in

the brain Improve science education…

Get many people working on a problem together

….

But How?

Make them into games!

150 billion human hours per year

McGonigal J. Reality is broken : why games make us better and how they can change the world. New York: Penguin Press; 2011.

empire state building

one year of solitaire

one year of games

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7M 9B 150B

Doing Science with Games

MOLT

The Cure

Learning Science with Games

• Many of the more successful games in the previous slide are now ubiquitous in educational settings. e.g. Foldit for teaching 3d protein structure and prediction.

• Many games also built with the specific goal of education.

http://tinyurl.com/ismbgames

Games can be used to teach

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.

Immune Attackhttp://ImmuneDefenseGame.com

• High school students• First person shooter

game• Significantly

improves understanding of concepts in immunology

Great!

So why Science Game Lab?

Use of games/gamification in education and research

Expressivity: Depth of learning, problems solved

FunBenefits: recruiting, engagement

Rosalind.infoCACAO

Gamified: badges, leaderboards, levels

Lecture course: Typically no game elements

Classroom,Work…

The CureFoldit

PhyloMax5

Game: you “play it”, learning more implicit, purposes aside from education

Genes in Space

EteRNA

Holy Grail?

Cost $$

Cost $$

Games are not cheap

• Basically no tradition of open source code in the game industry

• Bioinformatics postdocs generally know nothing about graphic design, Web design, mobile application development…

• Without truly great games, it is very hard to gather and keep attention focused for long.

Science Game Lab

• Provides a mechanism for pooling limited resources:– Developers – lower the barrier to entry• Reduce amount of code needed• Make it easier to attract players, students

– Players• Make it easier to find games, move from one game to

related games• establish a unified identity as a citizen scientist gamer

What is Science Game Lab?Science Game Lab (SGL) is a centralized online location for scientists and the general population to come together for the purposes of advancing Citizen Science -- specifically through games, activities & community. → Science Game Lab ←

www.ScienceGameLab.org

●Open Source Tools●Developer APIs ●Badges●Leaderboards●Community

Features

Much more than a Portal for finding games (but is that too)

MOLT

The Cure

www.ScienceGameLab.org

Brought to You By...

Playmatics

Connecting Gamers & Citizen Scientists to Research Worldwide

www.ScienceGameLab.org

Players get to access a growing catalogue of research-driven Citizen Science projects that all contribute to a central player score & identity.

For Players & Citizen Scientists Around the World

● Take part in a variety of Citizen Sciences games and activities

● Grow and build an online Ranking across all games● Get access to a central online profile, leaderboards,

message boards and more.● Access games related to a variety of scientific fields.● Be part of something that will potentially change the

world.

Home (try at own risk..) sciencegamelab.org/beta.php

More games…

Site Wide High Score

games

Achievements

Help

Profile

User Profile

Our first “Game”WikiPathways Academy

Game Page Click me

The SGL iFrame Experience

Content delivered from game partner (here WP)

Rendered in SGL provided iframe

SGL API records actions sent from game, provides users feedback in contextcaptures information for use on SGL

More activities guides users to other tasks provided by partner game

Learning to read pathway task

Learning to edit pathway task

Tasks organized into Quests

How did that work?

• Game developer builds game or series of tasks they want player to perform

• Game developer uses SGL developer tools to bind events in the game to triggers that send information to SGL.

• SGL tracks user behavior across games, providing in-game and site-wide rewards.

Developers

1. Create an account on SGL2. Request developer access (currently by email..)3. Build game4. Go to developer portal and configure SGL-

specific game events 1. reward points2. group into quests3. assign badges

More information at:http://tinyurl.com/sgldev

Dev Portal visible to authenticated devs.

Managing a game in SGL

SGL now

SGL next

The Cure

SGL 2017

The Cure

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Why WikiPathways #1?

WikiPathways... in Science GAME lab ?

“…. it addresses our greatest challenge of convincing people they are qualified and skilled enough to contribute to the knowledge base. And… we also want to make it fun!” -- Alex Pico, WikiPathways

?

Wikipathways uses for SGL

• Now: As a framework for recruiting and training new users– “transform their User Manuals and training videos into

interactive content that can plug into SGL. Through SGL they can turn this content into quests, friendly competitions and achievements.”

• Future: As a crowdsourcing system for accomplishing streams of curation tasks related to pathway construction.

Published figures

WikiPathways models

Image processing + human editors

Many Thanks To

• Sara Santini• John Szeder• Patrick Mooney• Melanie Stegman• Margaret Wallace• Nicholas Fortugno

• Alex Pico • Anders Riutta• Kristina Hanspers

• Ginger Tsueng• Andrew Su

Contactbgood@scripps.edu@bgood on twitter

This work was supported by the US National Institute of Health (grants GM089820 and U54GM114833) and by the Scripps Translational Science Institute with an NIH-NCATS Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA; 5 UL1 TR001114).

With ideas and support from:Jérôme Waldispühl, Antoine Taly, Dan Maclean, Jesse Himmelstein