Game of Science

Have you ever thought about walking a mile in a scientist’s shoes? Now you can do it with our new Game of Science. Find about various pitfalls waiting on every corner to unsuspecting scientists and overcome them with the help of Lindau Guidelines. Find out more at Sciathon 2021.

One of the critical tasks of science is to communicate new results in a concise and understandable way to general public. A crucial part of this process is trust, because without it the communication is impossible. During the pandemic we could fully see the amount of mistrust towards scientists in general public. However, this was not the case among scientists. In general, researchers tend to trust and rely on opinions of experts from other fields. The reason for this is that researchers follow a uniform set of guidelines which are universal and independent of discipline. In other words, they understand the process leading towards the results even when the science behind the results might be beyond their scope. Teaching people about how science works and not just the final results might get us further than we think.

The best way how to learn something new is to engage with the topic actively. One of the options how to achieve this is to play a game. The goal of this project is to design a game (either physical or digital) based on aspects from a life of scientists. Scientific method, competing for grants, peer review process, publish or perish environment, paywalls for papers, defense of your work in front of various boards, risks of sharing unfinished work – these are just a few pitfalls waiting for a researcher at every corner. However, for people outside of academia a lot of these concepts are foreign and elusive. Of course, there are also positive aspects such as teamwork, the joy of discovery, exhilaration of being first, successful conclusions of projects or aiding fellow researchers. All these inner workings of science remain hidden from outside.

Practically all the problems described in the previous paragraph are related to one of the points in Lindau guidelines. In fact, even for experts it is convenient to see how implementing Lindau guidelines can benefit how science gets done.
Let’s open the mysterious world of science to everybody and show its human face.

Image courtesy of Michal Jex

Group Leader

Michal Jex, Lindau Alumnus 2021
Université Paris Dauphine, France