It all started in December 2019 .. When WHO was informed of unknown cases in Wuhan City, China. Since then, the world has experienced one of the biggest and longest pandemics. However, the big difference is that this time, science had advanced a lot in the recent decades, and that gave us the biggest tool to fight back with this tiny COVID-19 virus.
A lot of scientists around the world gathered together to fight back! Quickly, multiple studies were conducted across the world, and that led to various solutions and vaccines. All this highlighted the importance of science more than ever. Everybody wants more of science. Everybody wants better answers and faster results.
On the other hand, there are problems in the world that are not easy to solve. Finding a good and fast solution to them requires studying a lot of different things altogether. And that takes time, money, and resources. One of the interesting initiatives is citizen scientists. Citizen science helps crowd-source studies and enables scientists with a lot of data they can work on. If you want to know more, I explained all about it (with examples) in this blog post.
From time to time, When I get bored and want to play games on my mobile phone. One day, I was wondering that it would be good to download some of those citizen scientists games. This way, whenever I wanted to free up my mind and play some game, I can play those and who knows, maybe I can contribute to something!
In this post, I’m going to share with you, 3 of the citizen scientists games I liked and installed on my phone to play from time to time.
1. Nemo-Net
We mapped more of the surface of the Moon and the Mars, than we have our own ocean!
Dr. Earle, Oceanographer
Sometime along the way, we humans got so excited about outer space, that we forgot our ecosystem. Therefore we know little about coral reefs and oceans. NASA created this game so that players can help classify coral reefs. The data from this game is fed to Pleiades Supercomputer to help build a neural network that can assess the health of coral reefs around the world.
You simply need to paint coral reefs with colour in a 3D scan of the ocean. It’s available for iOS, Android, and Windows.
2. Cancer Crusade
Cancer Crusade is the name of a game developed by Moffitt Cancer Center in the USA. The player plays the role of a doctor who is treating different virtual patients. There are some treatments available, and you can combine and apply them in a way to cure the Tumor. It’s quite a fun and engaging game. The results are sent back to Moffitt Cancer Center and analyzed for new and improved treatments. It’s available for iOS on App Store. Android version can be downloaded from their website.
3. ROCKS & RUNES
This game has been designed in the form of an animal that likes to collect shiny runestones. These runes are divided by some rocks. The player should destroy these rocks in order to combine runestones and release their magic power. In reality, the player is turning off inactive properties of compounds in order to boost the overall effectiveness. The data gives new opportunities to scientists to fight cancer. It’s available for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.
-
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rocks-runes/id1483617218?itsct=apps_box_link&itscg=30200
-
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.balancedmediatechnology.rocksandrunes
Last word…
I believe the idea of citizen science and the apps and games built based on it, needs much more attention in today’s world. We know how much science can protect our lifestyle and can give us the freedom we want to grow and roam.
Have you participated in any CitSci project? let me know what you think about these games or any other project you know about.
PS: I am NOT affiliated with any of the projects above, I wrote this simply because I find this idea interesting and worth talking about.