Meet Leader, Karen, aka Science Owl
Hi there, I’m Karen, aka Science Owl, a Girlguiding Cymru leader with 1st Coity Brownies (I let the brownies choose my Guiding Owl name), and a researcher and Wales Gene Park operations manager at Cardiff University.
It was science communication that introduced me to Girlguiding, when I volunteered at my daughter’s Brownies unit to run some science evenings with the girls. From being an occasional parental helper, to undertaking my ALQ, to helping run a unit all happened very quickly, but being part of Girlguiding continues to enrich my life no end - It is a privilege!
Professionally, I left the lab as a cancer researcher in 2017 and moved to an office job as Wales Gene Park operations manager, but I continue to keep connected to my research interests (genetic influences in cancer) and I remain an ardent believer in the importance of science communication.
It is for those reasons that I jumped at the chance of being involved with the Impact Games project with Impact Gamers and Girlguiding Cymru as part of Cardiff Science Festival 2021.
The email asking me if I’d like to be involved in this project came in late July 2020. The idea of the project was to give young people (Guides and Rangers) the skills needed to create computer games inspired by researchers and their work. The project team paired scientists and computer science student ambassadors with Girlguiding groups, with the remit of making a game related to the research.
Behind the scenes ahead of the group work, the Impact Gamers, a “community interest company that exists to inspire young people away from just game playing to become games makers”, trained a group of computer science student STEM ambassadors with the skills needed to train others. My remit as the scientist was to communicate the fundamental principles of my work so others could understand it in a way that they could “gamify” it.
The game development and group work happened over 5 (or 6) weeks in November 2020. The groups varied in size but were generally small (between 6-10 girls in each). I was lucky enough to work with 2 groups, and it was interesting how given the same information, each group took different things away and developed two very different games.
The one group hooked onto the notion of “bad” cancer cells dividing uncontrollably, and the aim of the game was to kill the cancer cells while not damaging the normal cells. The other group ran with the information about healthy living affecting lifetime cancer risk and developed a platform game to collect health to fight cancer.
During the group work sessions, each an hour in duration, the computer science student ambassadors led the girls through the process of decision making needed to create the games. Impact Gamers provided a variety of templates to work with and demonstrated the software they were using to build the games.
This software is freely available for all (https://www.clickteam.com) and instructions are available on the Impact Gamers website (https://www.impactgamers.net/guides) if others want to have a go themselves at making games.
The steps that were needed to build the games were shown to the girls, and the girls were encouraged to provide artwork that was included and made all the decision around the sounds and look of the games (shown below).
If I am honest the coding/programming aspect of the work was not what I was expecting. In my mind coding is about writing codes, command-line coding, knowing the language of computers. This project showed me that while coding is the process of writing instructions for machines or computers to get them to do what we want, there is now software available that can act as an interpreter, making the process streamlined and achievable.
I am looking forward to seeing the feedback from the project and hearing what the girls thought and learnt. It was a shame we didn’t hear more from the girls themselves during the showcase event in Feb 2021 as part of Cardiff Science Festival. But still, I enjoyed seeing how other people’s research into microneedles, or blackhole collisions, or MOFs (metal-organic frameworks) was transformed by the girls into games.
The games are available for all to play at http://igamers.io/csf.
Thanks for reading!