Assemble yourself is a paper-printable bioinformatics boardgame which is designed to be educational, fun and engaging. It introduces basic genetics and Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) through a a puzzle-like problem.
The main idea of the game is to manually perform assembly of a genome sequence from NGS reads. The entire game is printed on paper. This includes the reads (cut out paperstrips) and a board which serves scaffold to assemble the reads and writing down the sequence. Once the reads have been assembled and a consensus sequence is found, the consensus sequence is translated into amino acid sequences in both DNA strands. The letters of the amino acid sequence contains a secret word embedded within an open reading frame. Once the player finds the secret word he wins the game.
The game is generated by a computer program and many aspects of the game can be configured prior to generation. For instance, the secret protein word can be changed and the minimal read depth at any loci can be configured.
The game can be played by a single person or run as a competion, e.g., in a class. I have experienced the latter scenario to be a lot of fun, especially when students work in small groups.
To get the most out the game, players should have been introduced to/be familiar with the central dogma of biology and concepts like DNA, base-pairing, amino acid, strand, reading frame, gene and codon before playing the game.
The computer program is implemented in PRISM, a probabilistic logic extension of the Prolog language.
You can get PRISM here: http://rjida.meijo-u.ac.jp/prism/
Besides PRISM you will need a working installation of latex. The program calls pdflatex to generate a PDF-file from the .tex file generated by the program.
Once you have both PRISM and Latex installed, you can run the program from PRISM by starting prism in this directory and typing:
prism(game), go([g,e,n,e]).
Where [g,e,n,e] is the secret protein name specified as a Prolog list. This will generate the printable game as gene.pdf .
If you are fortunate enough to be on a Unix platform, you may also run the program to using game.sh shell script, e.g.,
$ ./game.sh gene
This will generate similarly generate the printable game as gene.pdf .
You may adjust various settings such as the minimum read depth and the read length by editing settings.pl.
For the impatient, a few pregenerated games are available in the examples folder of this repository.
The game was written by Christian Theil Have. Emil Vincent Appel volunteered time for beta testing and brainstorming ideas and Jette Bork-Jensen also contributed with ideas. Some of the code is derived from the LoSt framework (https://github.com/cth/the-lost-framework) written by Henning Christiansen, Ole Torp Lassen, Matthieu Petit and my self (Christian Theil Have).
Copyright (C) 2014 Christian Theil Have
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.