Building Games

Immunology Wars Mega Game: Enhancing Immunology Education

One of the main challenges I have faced is getting students to see the link between different components of the immune system and how they work together to help defend the body. I have previously used Star Wars as a medium to teach immunology, helping to decontextualise the material (Immunology Wars). A colleague and I decided to try and take this a stage further and develop an Immunology Wars mega game, where groups of students are given different immunology scenarios and must trade resources with other groups (represented by planets of the Star Wars universe) to collect the correct immune components to fight off the disease.

ChatGPT was used to help map out the different scenarios and resources that would be needed and to develop some “curve ball” moments, which then changed the scenario and required students to adapt their strategy. DALLE-3 was used to create some of the imagery for the resources.

Workflow Development

Prompts were built up over quite a few conversations with GPT4 as there are various different aspects to the project. I first asked GPT4 to be a game designer and explain the mechanics of an in-person mega game. Based on that output I had to refine the prompt to clarify that it was going to be an education mega game. Next, I asked GPT4 to become an expert immunology educator with lots of experience developing games. I then got it to provide a broad outline of what an immunology focused mega game would look like. Following that I had to refine this and asked GPT4 to create 10 different scenarios which all involved an infection of some kind in an area of the body with a different type of pathogen. Each scenario was created one by one, with GPT4 outlining the nature of the infection, the key immune components involved in the body’s response to that infection and the time it takes for the body to produce these resources. Finally, I also asked GPT4 to create a series of chance cards for each scenario, which make the scenario easier or harder, so that we can challenge groups that are getting through their challenge too quickly or make it easier for groups that are struggling. To align this with Star Wars/Immunology Wars I fed in a list of the main characters that we have defined on the website and their corresponding immune components and asked GPT4 to align the two.

Game Trial and Future Development

This has been run as a trial with a group of student volunteers to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the game and it is being further refined with the longer-term goal of developing this into a teaching session and community building event. By and large, all the students enjoyed the concept and commented that it would probably make immunology more memorable. The proof will be when we try to scale it up and run with larger groups of students with each group playing on a different planet with different resources that they can trade with other groups.