When Online Citizen Science meets Teaching: Storyfication of a science discovery game to teach, learn, contribute to genomic research

Abstract

Video game is a versatile and powerful media to communicate and engage the public in life science research and education, where it is increasingly used as a teaching support tool in higher education. At the same time, video games are also becoming common vehicles for citizen science initiatives in molecular and cell biology that allows participants to contribute to real scientific data analysis. Since 2010, our citizen science game Phylo (http://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca) enlists internet users in comparative genomic data analysis. Although it was not its initial purpose, Phylo also quickly became a popular resource for biology instructors. Here, we introduce a new release of Phylo and its web platform for advanced users OpenPhylo, which have been redesigned to facilitate educational uses. Phylo now features a story mode that progressively introduces basic comparative genomic concepts to the participants and allow them to contribute to improve the alignment of real DNA and RNA sequences. We also implement new roles and functionalities in OpenPhylo that enable instructors to easily create, invite, and monitor progresses of students on assignments using Phylo. Our data shows that our approach promotes student engagement and contributes to support the teaching of basic comparative genomics principles.