SCIBORG: The Science Literacy Board Game

In today’s fast-paced digital world, scientific misinformation can spread rapidly. Civic science literacy—the ability to understand how scientific knowledge is developed and evolves—is an essential skill. This skill equips individuals to better grasp how scientific understanding changes over time and critically evaluate information presented in the media, a vital component of media literacy. This is particularly crucial in areas such as climate change science. However, key aspects of science literacy are challenging to convey effectively. With traditional education systems already tasked with numerous learning objectives, complex interdisciplinary topics like scientific literacy often receive insufficient attention.

Recognizing the need for innovative approaches, our project has developed a fun and educational board game to tackle science literacy called SCIBORG. This game primarily tackles the steps of the scientific method: observation, question, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. The game takes place over three phases: hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. In each phase, players collect components such as “collect sufficient data” and “find collaboration partners” to earn points. Whoever has the most points over the three phases wins. The board game includes examples from a wide variety of scientific fields including ecology, physics, history, engineering, psychology, and medicine in order to highlight that these steps are applied across fields. Players have bonus cards with specific research goals such as “Build a robot” and “Mission to Mars!” that tackle interdisciplinary topics. Finally, chance cards are dealt after every phase such as “You have a scientific breakthrough” and “Your research proposal was rejected” to illustrate the uncontrollable factors in research.

The game was play-tested with various groups both inside and outside of the classroom. Pre- and post-questionnaires were given to the players to assess their understanding of the scientific method and their reaction to the game. The game is available both online and in a print and play format. We will present the idea behind the game, its mechanics, as well as our first evaluation results.