Role-playing the life of a scientist

Over the past decade, board games have become increasingly popular as a method to marry educational content with play. To teach complex scientific concepts and to highlight the many careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) that students can pursue, Claire Murray (left), Mark Basham (center), Matthew Dunstan (right), and their colleagues designed an educational board game, primarily for secondary school students. The board is based on the floor plan at the Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility, where Murray and Basham work as research scientists. Dunstan is a chemistry postdoc at the University of Cambridge and designs board games in his spare time.

To win, players—in the role of scientists—must complete projects, which they do by moving from one beamline to another and conducting experiments. The various cards that players draw affect the success of experiments, and players who work together can gain advantages over their competitors. The initial play testing of the board game by 222 students revealed a change in many of the participants’ perceptions of what it means to be a scientist. Before playing, many students described scientists as being “smart” and “successful.” Afterward, however, many of them also associated “collaboration” and “failure” as features of scientists’ careers. And of the 82 students who said that they would not like to be a scientist or engineer, 22 changed their minds after playing the game. (C. Murray et al., Res. All, 2022, doi:10.14324/RFA.06.1.14 ; image courtesy of the Diamond Light Source.)