Overview
What Is ImmuneQuest?
ImmuneQuest is an innovative educational game for college students that brings immunology to life. Designed to augment an educator’s existing curriculum, ImmuneQuest allows students to build and control a virtual immune system to defend their human host from increasingly cunning microbes. Why we created ImmuneQuest.
A New Way to Learn Immunology
Immunology is complex, and daunting to learn. For many, the way in which the immune system responds as an interconnected whole is simply lost among the vast array of detail that must be internalized. ImmuneQuest augments traditional learning by focusing the student's attention on this elegant, interconnected whole, through fun, fast-paced experiential learning. In ImmuneQuest, students control a growing repertoire of interrelated immune actions as they build and master their virtual immune system.
Advanced Learning Methodology – Learn by Doing
ImmuneQuest utilizes advanced 3D game technology to enable students to experience how the immune system works. Learning concepts are distilled into actions, feedback, and measurable metrics. While the immune characters are game-like, their interconnected immunological actions – all under the control of students – become increasingly more sophisticated to match the evolving abilities of microbial invaders. Students learn by doing.
How is mastery of the immunobiology concepts measured?
Content
What's Inside?
ImmuneQuest divides the virtual immune system into five major parts. Each part builds on the player's previous experience across a series of 3 interactive levels, plus 3 optional, bonus levels where the cumulative lessons learned are subjected to new and unique challenges. Every level unlocks more immune system upgrades and new immune cells to help the player overcome increasingly sophisticated and stealthy microbial threats.
Part 1: The First Responders
Begin with the most ancient evolutionary components of the innate immune system – macrophages and complement – the first to encounter microbes in the host tissues.
Part 2: Reinforcements Cometh
First responders are overrun. Signal for cellular reinforcements from the blood. Unlock voracious neutrophils and experience first-hand how these innate immune components work synergistically.
Parts 3-5 (Coming Soon)
These parts focus on immune defenses against viruses and building the adaptive immune system. By the end of Part 5, one will have mastered how all eight immune components work as an interconnected whole to defend host tissues!
Your purchase of Part 2 will help fund the development of Parts 3-5!
Educators
ImmuneQuest is designed to augment college curricula in biology, immunology, bioengineering, nursing, medicine, and healthcare. ImmuneQuest can also provide an immunology component for institutions that do not retain faculty members with immunology expertise, and can be added to AP high school biology programs to further inspire students to enter the life sciences.
Why we created ImmuneQuest
Educator's Portal
ImmuneQuest measures student performance against learning objectives and provides those metrics to students –compared with their peers. We have also created a free tool for educators to observe student progress within the program and foster competition among students.
Access the Educator's Portal
Why We Created ImmuneQuest
Our ultimate goal is to inspire more students to be drawn to immunology and become our future leaders in life science and medicine.
As one of the most complex, daunting, yet rewarding areas of study in the life sciences, immunology is critical not only for advancing the study of infectious disease, but also autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, Crohn’s arthritis, lupus), cancer, asthma, and many others.
Current approaches struggle to illustrate the systemic nature of immune responses. Educators from high school to medical school all described a pressing need to enable students to move beyond the nomenclature and the detailed nature of textbooks to grasp the immune system as an interconnected whole.
Therefore, our approach is to maintain focus on the immune system as a living and responsive mechanism, and to explore how various components of this system interact and affect the entire system in the presence of external or internal variables.
To bring this vision to reality, our PhD scientists and technologists – with significant support from the National Science Foundation – combined advanced game technology, systems-engineering, and modern learning methodologies.
Part 1: The First Responders
See full list of Concepts Covered
The Sentinels
to Macrophages
Some Assembly Required
to Complement
Sugar Coated Nightmare
Bonus Levels: More practice with challenging scenarios
Stealth
Sneaky Microbes
Hold 'em Off
that Recolonizes Tissue
The SOS
to Call in Reinforcements
Part 2: Reinforcements Cometh
See full list of Concepts Covered
Calling for Backup
and More Innate Functions
Hot on the Trail
Recruitment From Blood
Nothin' but NET
Bonus Levels: More practice with challenging scenarios
The Capsule
They Can't Upregulate
What Doesn't Kill Them...
They are Too Virulent
Under Siege
Educator's Portal
Get Started in Three Simple Steps
- Register your Class: Click this link to register your course with ImmuneQuest. Register as many courses/classes as you want.
- Students register by opening ImmuneQuest and clicking “Student”. They will enter your code, their name, and confirm to join the class.
- Open ImmuneQuest, click “Student”, click “Review Class Stats”, and select the class you want to view.
Creative Commmon Attribution
Images indicated with [CC-BY] provided under the terms of the Creative Commons Public License available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Windows 8,
Windows 10
ImmuneQuest Pricing
To Purchase Additional Levels, launch ImmuneQuest and click the Store.
Purchase of additional levels will help fund development of ImmuneQuest Parts 3-5, which introduce even more immune components such as natural killer cells, B-cells, T-cells, antigen and antibodies to combat a horde of nasty new microbes. In the end, players will master how all eight components of the immune system work together to defend the body from all types of pathogenic microbes.
