Games and Sims
How To Play
Control Panel
- Healthy Cells - Number of healthy cells at the start of the imulation
- Cancer Cells - Number of cancer cells at the start of the imulation
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Cell Types -
- Treatment Sensitive - Populate the cells with treatment sensitive cancer cells included
- Chemo Resistant - Populate the cells with chemo resistant cancer cells included
- Radiation Resistant - Populate the cells with radiation resistant cancer cells included
- Intensity - The percentage of cells that are destroyed every cycle. For example, an intensity of 50% would randomly destroy 50% of all cells whenever a treatment is applied
- Name - Enter your name to save your high scores. If no name is provided, a random name is generated for you
- Reset High Scores - Reset the high score board
Health & Tumor Bar
- Health - The number of healthy cells of the patient. The game is over when this health reaches 0. Maximum health is 10000
- Tumor Size - The number of tumor cells of the patient. The game is over when this bar is full
High Score Board
- High Scores - A list of the players with the highest patient survival time (measured in cycles)
Console
- Display -
- Cell Counts - Displays information about the different cell types in the simulation
- Current Cycle - The current cycle in the sim. The cycle increases every 5 seconds. Every cycle, each cell in the sim divides into two, therefore the total number of cells are doubled.
- Buttons-
- Play - Start the simulation
- Chemo - Apply chemotherapy treatment to the patient
- Radiation - Apply radiation therapy treatment to the patient
- Reset - Repopulate the cells with new cell types
Patient
- Cells - This displays the patient and a graphical representation of the cells in the affected area of the patient's body.
Cell Types
Monkey Opsins
Color Vision – The Hungry Monkey
Trichromatic monkeys can find conspicuously colored food much better than dichromats. Will you be an effective forager under dichromatic conditions? Play the game and find out!
To read an abstract of the original experiment see: Caine and Mundy 2000.
Color Vision – Find the Circle… Quickly!
Dichromatic monkeys are good at shape recognition when color-interference is high. Can you find shapes when color becomes a distractor, or are you better in dichromatic conditions? Play the game and find out!
To read an abstract of the original experiment see: Saito et al. 2005.
Mouse Fur Color
Fur Color – Colonizing the Beach
When mice are camouflaged in their surroundings they will likely have a better chance to reproduce and pass their color alleles down to their offspring. This simulation looks at what happens when a fur color mutation occurs in different mouse populations. How might this mutation change the phenotype frequencies when the population is under predation pressure? Play the game to find out!
Fur Color – The Mouse Hunter
In this simulation you get to be the predator. See how quickly you can catch a white mouse in different soil environments.
The above simulations were inspired by research conducted by Kaufman (1974) and by research being conducted at the Hoekstra lab at Harvard University. For more information visit their site: http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/hoekstra/
Garden Pea Evolution
Pea Taste – The Selective Farmer
The round allele R is dominant and the wrinkled allele r is recessive. Question: if you were a farmer, would it be easier to selectively breed your peas to remove the R allele, or the r allele? Play this classic population genetics simulator to find out.
