Genome Game

An HTML5/Javascript game for learning about bioinformatics, binary numbers and genome and phenotypes.

Play the Genome Game now!

This is a simple game/teaching activity for secondary school children based on bioinformatics. The game can be used to explore counting in binary, combinatorics, and the correspondence between a genome and the physical features of an organism.

A typical use of this game in a classroom would be as follows:

  1. Start with a chat about inheritance. Who looks a bit like their parents or like their brothers and sisters? We inherit some of our characteristics from our parents. This information is passed from our parents to us in the form of a genome, which contains genes.
  2. You can see a genome (4 binary digits or "bits") and a creature. Click to toggle the values of the genes/bits in the genome and see the effect they have on the creature.
  3. Which genes are responsible for which changes? What do you think the rules are?
  4. How many different creatures can be made with 4 genes/bits? How many with 2? or 3? How can we work out how many there can be?
  5. Click to show the actual rules. These are if-then-else rules. Change the rules to create a different correspondence between genome and creature.
  6. When you've chosen your rules, click to create a population. A selection of creatures and their genomes will be created from your rules, and the rules will be hidden. Ask a friend to guess the rules from seeing the population. What makes it easy? What makes it hard?
  7. Play the game by clicking the "Start Game" button. There's a countdown timer and when you make correct guesses the table will turn green.
  8. How many genes are in baker's yeast? How many in a human? How many genes are responsible for your eye colour? How many genes are in a plant like wheat? How many individuals would we need to consider to understand what our genes do?
  9. Development of the game in future could include the introduction of more complication such as AND, OR, and n-ary combinations of genes and maybe chromosomes (epistasis, dominance, etc).

See the genome game blog post about how we used this game.

This game is released under the MIT License, and source code is found at genome-game at Github.