Introduction: Educational Games.

Phylogenetic trees are an important part of learning and understanding evolution.  The concept behind the phylogenetic tree is that it is a diagram which demonstrates the relationships amongst species based on similar and differing phenotypes and genotypes.  This is an important part of understanding evolution through an organised representation of diversity and relatedness.  By understanding if a species is more related to one species than another it is possible to discover ancestral traits and investigate conserved sequences of DNA.  Often relatedness is not immediately obvious, and organisms with similar outward appearance are not always necessarily closer related than organisms exhibiting a different phenotype.  The phylogenetic tree is an extremely useful tool, with the nodes representing traits which can determine where similarities and diversity occurs throughout evolution and the ability to understand tree based design is extremely important in the practices of life sciences. 

The use of games to facilitate learning, is a particularly useful tool. They tend to engage the user with the topic and have a higher retention of the user than that of a book or other teaching tool due to the element that it is fun, and the user feels motivated to continue, viewing it as leisure rather than a simple learning experience.  Games which are available on PC or tablet/phones are more useful that ever as most teens will have at least one of these devices (quite good at using them too) 

Phylo

This particular game is a different take on the traditional learning games, who seek to provide an interesting and engaging way for the user to understand often complex topics.  Phylo is a game which seeks to use the input of the game for real life scientific research, and falls under the category of games which have been coined ‘crowd-sourcing games’ and are designed to call upon the collective problem solving skills of the players to solve real world problems.

There has been a few success stories with crowd sourcing style games so far such as the games ‘Foldit’ and ‘EteRNA’.  The idea behind Foldit is to use outsourcing to help scientists to find the best way to fold complex proteins.  Proteins fold into particular shapes and there is a particular shape which will be the most stable and best for the function of the protein, with Foldit, the user will play around to fold the protein to a shape which is stable and of low energy and thus far the game has achieved some great successes thanks to the players.  For more information on Foldit, there is an information page here which also has a collection of publications on the successes of the game including that of protein structure solved by players which have had incredible contributions to science!

EteRNA similarly is designed to allow the users to design an RNA molecule and the most successful molecules as voted by the users will actually be synthesized in a real laboratory, with the players receiving information about the subsequent behaviour of the molecules.  

Figure 1 Alignment through puzzles.. image found here

Phylo is an interesting game, created by bioinformaticians it allows the user to actually help researchers through matching coloured blocks.  So in effective this game becomes a crowd-sourcing effort for researchers where DNA can be aligned and a phylogenetic tree can be created.  The game helps with a problem in sequence aligning where you are aligning several similar sequences in genes common to many species.  This is a frequent occurrence, a gene such as this  is a conserved gene and is usually an important gene for normal functioning of an organism (hence why it has become conserved).  Algorithms  are usually used in programs which are designed to align sequences however these can be prone to error.  This game should improve the sequence alignment.

In Phylo, the sequences are represented with a colour block for each of the four bases and the player has to find a matching sequence through moving the coloured blocks, the game starts with comparing of two organisms and eventually up to eight different organisms will be compared.

The difference between Foldit and EteRNA and the game under review here Phylo, is Foldit is actually designed to teach the player about molecular biology, in particular protein folding.  Likewise EteRNA has tutorials in order to teach the basics of RNA folding – and therefore places an importance on the educational concept of the game .  Whereas Phylo has avoided the educational route.  The educational benefit of this game is limited, the game requires no knowledge or learning curve and simply is designed to be a puzzle.  The point of this is to encourage more users as it is a project of crowd-sourcing and in this way regardless of knowledge help thousands of people are making a contribution to geneticists by playing.

On playing the game you first select from an option of diseases such as cancers, infectious diseases or heart and muscle  diseases.  Then you are presented with the blocks which you are to start moving, and a small phylogenetic tree is created on the side.

 In the gameplay the blocks should be moved to to create colour matches and increase the score.  The game shows your current score, the best score you have achieved so far in the level and the Par, which is the computers highest score.  There is penalties for for gaps and mismatches and bonus for matches.  As you progress, a phylogenetic tree will display on the left of the screen and this will tell the player which sequences should similarly align in priority.  This doesn't really require the  user to have much knowledge or learn much about phylogenetic trees, however, it does give a small introduction to understanding the concept of trees and their connection to alignment.

Although the game is not particularly educational, and more just a game which contributes to scientific research rather than teaching however, still worth a mention as it has been useful to science, in improving accuracy for alignments, which in turn can create more accurate phylogenetic trees.

In terms of improvements of a game like Phylo, it would have been nice to include a tutorial (even if it was optional) to offer players more information behind the science of sequence alignment and the importance of correct alignments leading to the discovery of evolutionary relationships and the design of accurate phylogenetic trees.  A far more advanced version of the game could be designed which would place a higher importance on the educational element and could even offer the opportunity for the users to actually create a phylogenetic tree with successful alignments.  The game offers no information about different species, another potential addition for a more comprehensive version of the game could be useful, maintaining the game as a crowd-sourcing game, but giving the educational edge as seen by other similar games.

Evolution game, NOVA Labs

NOVA labs is a collection of free digital resources for the sciences.  The goal is to engage people with the interactive games which they call ‘labs’ and motivate them to learn.  The game I am reviewing here is the evolution game and the idea behind this one, is that the user can explore  and understand how to create and interpret phylogenetic trees.  It sets aside the importance of having phylogenetic trees in all areas of life science.  This particular lab has the game of creating a phylogenetic tree, and the detailed ‘deep tree’, which is a large interactive infographic of the all species on a tree.  The game can be found at the PBS nova labs website

This game was orignially designed as an exhibit for a museum with the 'life on earth' team and this was then scaled into a web version for different uses, including on the NOVA labs website as part of their lab series.  More information about the background of BAT (build a tree) and the design concept on making the game is available here

In the game, creating the tree, there are several levels.  For each there is a short video introduction, so the user will have a good understanding of the game then onto building the tree!  The types  of organism changes throughout the game giving the user a varied representation of the different types of species which can be linked in this way.  There was a mixture of looking for phenotypic traits and genetic differences throughout the game, again giving the user an understanding that there are different ways in which a species can be linked and it might not be obvious at first glance.  

Below are some pictures of game-play.  The layout of the game was really neat and visually attractive.  It was very user friendly and there was enough information that the user would learn a little about the species themselves as well as about creating the tree.  At the end of each round when the user has successfully completed the tree a question will pop up, and the tree can be used to derive the answer.  This is a  fun way to test the users understanding of the tree they have created. 

The game does have the feel of an educational experience, it doesn't feel more like a game with an educational element like some of these types of games. But this doesn't reduce its ‘fun’ and it still becomes an addictive experience!  The use of different species for comparison was interesting, even using dinosaurs with birds showing this evolution 

The very first video really explains the basics of trees in a really nice visual way. Also explains how the game will be played from then on.   Will be learning about a species then you are to grab the animal and the trait  you have to correctly build each tree to get onto the next level – strangely addictive and there are different types – both traits and DNA there is also different organisms, bacteria, mammals  birds and plants. Even dinosaurs and birds demonstrating the divergent evolution for this relationship.  

For organisms throughout the lab, there is information available on them, as well as the link to the original source which is handy for anyone looking for more information.

The use of virus as a species for creating a map was another interesting choice and good to provide the end user with a varied outlook on connecting species in an evolutionary tree

In the video you can see an idea of the gameplay.  Here there is a collection of skulls which are going to be used to create a phylogenetic tree. You can see they are arbitrarily placed on a map, then a skull selected for more  information, on opening the information screen there is a small blurb about each of the skulls then there is a collection of points for comparison, which will be used when making the phylogenetic tree

When one of the points for comparison is connected to the tree,  you can start to find the points they all have in common (in this case forward facing eyes) and then start to find common connections and moving the skulls changing the shape of the tree and eventually connecting them all correctly.

The same game can also follow a slightly different format, using the differences in the DNA of the organisms rather than the phenotypic traits.  This demonstrates that there can be similarities genetically even if they are not phenotypically present.  The video below demonstrates the gameplay where the organisms small DNA sample is shown and the tree is built around using this.  On completing the tree a question will pop up, asking the user to use the tree to answer the question.  In this way the user is tested on their understanding of how to interpret the tree.

On completion of the game, you have access to the ‘deep tree’ which can be seen in the video below.  This an impressive interactive infographic on the species of the world on an evolutionary tree.  There is a search option at the bottom, when you start typing to look for a specific organisms, related organisms will pop up in a box, perfect for if there are any spelling errors this can really help the user to find what they are looking for.  On clicking on the organism you are looking for and clicking the search icon, the map zooms further in, to get to the branch on the tree containing the organism you are searching for.  It possible to then view a large picture and see a little more information about the organism, with searchable links to the origins of the photo.  The tree can be zoomed in and out of to see more organisms throughout the tree.  On clicking on one of the topics such as ‘Eukaryotes’ you can see additional information about eukaryotic organisms.

The deep tree is a great resource, however it is difficult to get an immediate overall picture of the evolutionary relationship of organisms, which requires a lot of zooming in and searching.  Luckily the search function is great, however, if it designed in such a way that you are searching for a particular organism allowing it to zoom in and find it, then you can manipulate the screen and look at the nearby relationships, this might suggest to me you are looking for a level of detail about a particular organism, and unfortunately I don't think this level of detail is available.  I understand originally this was a museum exhibit so too much additional information on species would be unnecessary but perhaps for the web adapted version additional information, links to important papers or other websites would be a really useful addition to the design.

In the creation of the game a large importance was placed on making the interpretation of the phylogenetic tree clear and easy to eliminate the idea that a tree is read like a book, from left to right and to understand that following the branches and nodes on the trees will help to correctly interpret the tree, rather than branches that line up near one another having any kind of relationship.
The use of different types of organisms was important and the information about them was seen as important, but not as important as understanding the fundamentals of designing and interpreting the phylogenetic trees themselves.

The game is easy to get into, and easy to understand right away.  It was designed this way as it was originally designed as a museum exhibit and there wouldn't be time for the user to have a prolonged interaction with the game and time to understand it.

Using the game as an exhibit helped to shape the web adapted version of the game, with the recorded interaction of players and subsequent interactions with these players on the topic of evolution would provide ideas towards improving the game as a learning experience and in terms of functionality as well.  The current version of the game as reviewed here has additional features in also adding the traits to the tree and the ability to shape the structure of the tree more effectively.

An addition to the game that I would like to see is for a larger amount of data on the organisms themselves, or perhaps links to other resources such as GoogleEarth linking in the location that the organisms are found to make it a more all round resource although this addition might be better suited to the deep tree part of the website.  This could help make the game a larger and more prominent learning experience.  Another minor change I would consider making might be to reset the tree if too many mistakes are made, to prevent guesswork and encourage the user to think intuitively based on the knowledge they are gaining on phylogenetic tree building.  I do think really highly of the game as a whole, it makes the concept of building phylogenetic trees an interesting, exciting and understandable area of life science.  The think the game is enjoyable and really informative.