Call for Teachers to evaluate Immune Attack
Immune Attack is a 3rd person shooter inside a human body. Players navigate a nanobot through a 3D environment of blood vessels and connective tissue in an attempt to save an ailing patient by retraining her non-functional immune cells. Along the way, students learn about the biological processes that enable macrophages and neutrophils – white blood cells – to detect and fight infections.
Dr. Melanie Stegman, a LEEF 2011 presenter, and the Federation of American Scientists are estatic that their preliminary evaluation of Immune Attack in classrooms across America have returned promising results!! Students are learning basic principles of cell and molecular biology just by playing.
Evaluate Immune Attack 2011. We need YOU!
To participate, please register at www.fas.org/immuneattack. The evaluation requires three 40-minute periods in a computer lab. You will need students and parents to sign consent forms. Your students will play Immune Attack or a control game once in week one and once in week two. Then your students will take an online survey in week two. Immune Attack works on any PC, with any versions of Windows (XP, Vista, and 7). Immune Attack does not work on the Macintosh operating system.
Data shows that students are learning the basic principles of cell biology and immunology. We need to increase our numbers to answer some important questions, such as, so non-gamer also learn from Immune Attack, or are they put off by the need to learn to fly a microbot. (So far they are not.) Students like playing Immune Attack because it feels like a real video game, involves flying and shows real details of cells and proteins inside the body.
We need some younger students, 5th-6th grades as well. (We still want 7-12th graders, too!) We have found that 7th grade students are learning similarly to 12th graders. We know that 5th and 6th grade students enjoy playing Immune Attack, so we want to know whether the game teaches them anything. Please help out!
Questions?
