Team:Hong Kong HKU/cardgame

Card Game

Have you ever thought of learning genetic engineering outside the classroom? To promote the subject to high school students, we created a card game from which players can learn about the principles of genetic engineering while having fun. In the game, players can translate genes to proteins to perform different cellular activities, acquire plasmids for special abilities, metabolize glucose to generate ATP, interact with other players etc. Players win by acquiring enough units of proteins.

The card game also illustrates the difficulty of maintaining a viable bacterial system in a research lab. Players need to defend themselves against survival challenges like virus attacks, dehydration and toxins. They lose if they run out of ATP. Players can appreciate the technical challenge of synthetic biology research in general and the intricate interactions between biological systems and the environment. We enhanced this component of the game as suggested by teammates working in the lab. A large part of their work involved troubleshooting different experimental processes by scientific reasoning as well as trial and error.

The game is designed such that players always face some tradeoff when performing actions. This is in line with the principle of genetic engineering, as modifying a biological system to add in a desired feature would inevitably bring some adverse effects to the system, sometimes countering the positive effects brought by the engineering.

At the beginning, we did some research on the biology of bacterial hosts, and came up with a theoretical outline of the game. We tried out the game several times, each time coming up with some modifications. Later, we invited some of our other friends outside the team to play the card game, who gave us useful feedback to improve it. The cards were then designed using photoshop. We also have a few stacks of the cards. Do approach us if you want to give the game a try!