SciStarter & Discover Magazines feature BALANCED’s approach to Citizen Science
BALANCED’s senior designer Nathan Bowden and VP Jay Halderman were recently interviewed by SciStarter and Discover Magazine for their article Gaming for Science: How Video Games Are Making Research Fun. The discussion focused on making games for citizen science, inviting the public to take part in real scientific research through play and gamification, which turns the grinding work of collecting and analyzing data into something fun and even rewarding.
“A player doesn’t even need to know the potential scientific benefits to enjoy the game. Adding enough reward to the gameplay to keep players interested in the game itself is a fundamental goal when designing citizen science games.”
Nathan Bowden – BALANCED Senior Designer
Multiple BALANCED projects have achieved just that by coupling machine-learning algorithms with human-guided interactions facilitated through games. Underneath the hood of shattering brightly-colored blocks in the pattern-matching game Rocks & Runes or fighting ghosts in the arcade-style shooting game Wiley Wizard, players’ decisions are actually sorting through data from FDA-approved drug compounds to isolate promising combinations of co-medication properties used to identify new chemotherapeutic treatments to fight cancer.
Read full Discover Magazine article
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