The Immunology Card Game: Virtual Edition

As our time remote teaching continues, I have to decide what to do about each of the labs we usually do in AP Bio. Since it's also a dual enrollment class, I need to finish the content and our credit issuing college has asked that I come up with substitutes for each of the labs that we usually do.

I love the immunology game lab that we do and decided to convert it to a virtual version. I blogged about the game here.  You'll find all of the game files there too. To make it virtual, I made a google slides presentation that I will give my students editing privileges. Each lab group will have its own set of three slides to work with.  Students are used to this since we regularly put our lab data into a shared google sheet.

Another beauty of using google slides it that even when all of my students are in breakout rooms, I can see what they are all doing in slides in real time. Then I can broadcast messages like, "Make sure to stay on your own slides." I plan to do a lot of question answering at first as well, since even when we do it in class there are many questions. Once they catch on to what they are doing at the beginning they can usually take it from there to the end fairly independently.

In the slide at the top of the blog, there are pictures of all of the cards that they would be laying on their desktops as they progressed through the infection. You can't tell from the picture, but there are actually 30 of each picture stacked on each other. Students can drag one picture at a time onto their virtual desktop as they need to.

Since I don't know how to simulate putting cards in bags to pick out randomly, one person in the lab group will cut up a piece of paper and write the initials of whatever card it's supposed to be and toss it into a bag. When the person picks a card, she can tell her lab partners which card to drag out onto their desktop.

We finish the lab by them storyboarding the process of a primary bacterial or viral infection on their desks with chalk markers and the game cards. There is also a slide with all of these cards so students can do that virtually on the slide.

You can find the Google Slides virtual lab here. The links to all of the other files for this lab can be found on the post that I linked at the beginning of this post.

The Immunology Card Game for AP Biology

We do human body systems at the end of AP Biology.  I like to save my favorite for last.  The only drawback is that by this time of year we are starting to lose some steam.  I try to teach this unit almost entirely by activity.  I started searching in early Spring for ideas of what to do with immunology.  I found an article in the American Biology Teacher, "The Immune System Game" from the May 2015 issue. I decided to make my own "characters" for the game just to make copies a little easier.  After a test run playing the game with my husband, I decided that I also needed to rewrite the directions in an easier to follow way. There are so many steps in the process and what you do changes depending on what cell from the body you are looking at. I opened a google drawing and made a flow chart of the directions. It seemed to work well with the class.

The "bad" guys...

We did run out of time before we got to simulate a viral infection. Next year, I'll have half of my groups "play" the bacterial infection and the other half "play" the viral infection. Then we'll have a group discussion about the differences.

The "good" guys...

I also found in the trials that even for the primary infection, the body ended up with a lot of immune cells--so it didn't demonstrate the advantage the pathogens have the first time around (in the primary immune response). We didn't have any trials where the pathogens won over the immune system. I've changed the flow chart to reflect an increased reproductive rate for pathogens and a decrease in the reproductive rate of the macrophages.

Here are the files I made for the game:

• Key to Immune Characters
• Antibodies
• B-cells and Helper T cells
• Cytotoxic T cells
• Phagocytes
• Bacterial Pathogens
• Virus Infected Cells
• Plasma Cells and Cytokines
• Immune Game Flowchart (Bacterial)
• Immune Game Flowchart (Viral)

After the simulation, students diagram the immune response on a white board using the cards from the immune system game. They certainly understood the time difference between the primary and secondary immune responses after this game. Next year, I also want to emphasize humoral vs. cell mediated responses in their diagrams.

Update: I've worked on making this virtual and you can read about it here.