My Cells Project

In the month of October, our science class worked on a project where the assignment was to create some sort of creative way to learn our cells unit. The rules were very open; all we needed was an effective and creative way of learning that incorporated the topics we covered in class about cells.


For my project, I chose to create a board game. My board game, in the end, became very similar to my original plan (this was partly because my original plan was not very concrete). At first, our due date for the project had been a week earlier than in ended up being, and I was not ready at that time; I ended up taking longer than expected to finish my project; but once the due date was postponed, I was able to have a much better finished product.

My board game is called “Cell Life” and has a format similar to Monopoly.

For game pieces, I used cells (an eukaryotic animal cell, an eukaryotic plant cell, and a prokaryotic cell)...

In the Eukaryotic Cells, beans and other miscellaneous
objects are used to represent organelles

On the board, there are different colored squares, when you land on a(n)...

• Orange Square- take a nutrient card. These cards each come with nutrient and sometimes also a quantity of that nutrient. These will have positive and/or negative effects:

• Green Square- If not a plant cell, do nothing. If you do happen to be a plant cell, you “perform photosynthesis”. To do this, you must take the reactants (CO2, H2O, and Light Energy) from the photosynthesis bucket and ‘make’ them into a glucose sugar (represented by fruit candy). You then take the candy and put it into the “Glucose Circle” where the sugar can be used by any of the organisms:

• Yellow Square (and when passing start)- When landing on a yellow square, you may “perform cell respiration”. To do this, a player may take a sugar from the Glucose Circle, and use oxygen to break it down into ATP energy. The sugar is then counted as an “ATP Point”. To win, you must have the most ATP Points by the time the glucose reactants run out (no more candies in the photosynthesis bucket). Also, when passing start, you may take two sugars from the glucose circles as ATP Points:

• Blue Square- When landing on a blue square, you have a “chance to divide”. To ‘divide’, roll the dice. If you get double sixes, you then divide. There is no physical characteristic shown in the game when dividing, however, you then must act as if you were two cells- you take double the effects of everything (i.e. if you have a nutrient card which asks you to go five extra spaces, go ten):

The game also comes with a set of instructions:

"Cell Life" is a board game which demonstrates the different topics in the cell unit we have studied in class and mimics real life. It is formatted similar to Monopoly. The game shows how we need plants to stay alive because in the game all players rely in the plant cell to win the game. The game demonstrates each cell's role in photosynthesis, cell respiration, and cell division. The cells use nutrients throughout the game which may have negative or positive effects. The goal of the game is to have as many "ATP points" as possible when the game is over (when the sugars run out)...


Youtube video eplanation:

Document Containing set of instructions with more detailed explanation: Click Here

Throughout the project, I think I stayed on task and worked fairly efficiently, however I believe I should have planned better and more realistically (if not for the extra week, my project would not be 100% finished). I also feel that I could have tried to work in some of the topics in our cells unit a bit more smoothly than they are. Given that there were many other assignments and projects due in other classes at the simultaneously, I think I worked well but could have done some simple things that would help me manage my time better and have a better product.

I think my project is very visual, but it began to fall apart after the second week at some parts (ex: plant cell). It includes most of the topics we were required to incorporate into our projects, but some of them were worked in roughly and weren't entirely relevant to the game. I feel my project is informative (if you read the instructions) and creative, but it may not make the information stick and doesn't usually require you to retain all the content taught in the game.