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I recently heard about a upcoming computer game called Cellcraft. The website isn’t updated much, but you can check it out at http://www.cellcraftgame.com/. It’s being made somewhere in North Carolina, but details on the web site are scarce. Anyway, the point of the project is to use a computer game to teach cell biology. This isn’t really a new idea, of course, but probably what caught my attention was the name of the game.

“Cellcraft”, as in “Starcraft” ?

When I heard the name “Cellcraft”, I immediately thought of Starcraft, possibly due to the impending release of Starcraft 2. Of course, this was probably the intent of the authors of the game. I was a bit excited, imagining a real-time strategy game where you build mitochondria to power armies of proteins, or rally the immune system to fend of viral invaders. Call me a nerd, but wouldn’t it be sweet to have a game on par with Starcraft that had a cell biology theme? Unfortunately the actual game seems to be built in Flash, so you have some idea of what it will be like. Even so, I think this is a great idea for teaching biology, though I was perhaps disappointed that it’s no SC.

I guess I’ll probably take a look at it when it gets released, though, just for fun. The most recent blog post says it’s in “alpha” stages and being tested in the classroom. Supposedly the final release will be open for all to play. Who knows, maybe I’ll be using something like this in a biology class I teach in the future. This reminds me Times Attacks, the multiplication tables video game that teaches times tables in a doom-style first-person-shooter. Right now, these seem like novel ideas, but kids these days are so attached to computers in some form that this may be the only way to get them to learn things in the future.