Your final project for this course will be to boil down a genetic conflict system of your choice to it’s core elements and explain it to a non-expert audience. You will be using a board game as the medium to explain the system you have chosen. The rules of the game and dynamics the players participate in must demonstrate the mechanisms that drive the conflict.
This project will be done in groups of 2-3 students and have various artifacts you’ll need to produce, described below. For some inspiration you might consider looking at Peptide: A Protein Building Game. Robert is also always happy to geek out about other board games or related media.
You’ll be drafting these artifacts over a series of milestones during the quarter. After you have a team you should follow this link to set up your repository for documents. Robert will give a brief git tutorial for how to use this.
The project is due over 3 milestones and one presentation. The details for each milestone can be found at these links:
You will need to produce all the materials needed to learn, play, and teach your game. The language and formatting of these documents should be professional. The exact types of documents you will need to produce will depend on the game you design, but you will definitely need an instruction manual and may need to produce some cards, boards, etc. If you have specific material needs talk to Robert and we’ll see what we can do.
Remember, these documents are how you will be explaining your conflict system to a non-expert audience.
You will give a 20 minute presentation on how the mechanics of your game demonstrate the important dynamics of the conflict system you have chosen.
Your presentation should minimally touch on these points:
This presentation does not need to explain every rule of the game or how to play it. It should focus on the scientific ideas that inspire the game. This presentation should be aimed at an expert scientific audience and should add more detail beyond topics we have already discussed in class.
You will need to record a video introduction to your game. These should be no longer than 15 minutes, they should explain the core rules of the game, and touch on the scientific relevance of the dynamics demonstrated by the game. As an example of one such video, here is a brief review of Peptide. This video focuses more on the mechanics of the game than the science, but is meant as a general guide.
See the Video Instruction Page here for more details on turning this in.
During Finals Week we will have a play session of the games in our classroom. You will be expected to watch the videos of all the other groups games and will play at least 2 of these games. You will write a review of the games you play. Your review will reflect both on the game itself and its ability to communicate scientific ideas to players. Your final grade on the project will depend on how your peers rate your game. In order to get these points you need to submit valid reviews of at least 2 other games.