Teen's card game teaches cancer biology to San Diego kids
STEAMLabs International held five Tumor Tactics workshops this summer, reaching 150 K‑8 students at Deer Canyon Elementary School, Pacific Highlands Ranch Branch Library and Encanto Elementary School. Each participant left with a complete, free Tumor Tactics kit. In the game every player is a doctor managing three active tumors,lung, colon and skin,by playing treatment cards. A Colonoscopy card deals four damage to a colon tumor but only two to the others, while Chemotherapy can strike any tumor but requires a die roll, mirroring real‑world uncertainty. Event cards such as New Carcinogen shuffle cancer cards back into the deck, and IT Outage scrambles hands, echoing the unpredictable complications oncologists face. Utility cards like Second Opinion and Advance Screening reward forward planning. According to the ASCB COMPASS Outreach Program, 95 percent of the students raised their scores on a five‑question cancer biology quiz from start to finish. The game was created by Daniel Zhang, a rising senior at Canyon Crest Academy who conducts research at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center (NOTCH signaling, 1,450+ patient samples) and Cambridge University’s Cancer Research Institute. He designed Tumor Tactics after his grandmother died of stage 3 pancreatic cancer, using card games to move through his grief.
San Diego’s K‑8 students get a free, hands‑on way to see how doctors decide on cancer treatments.
Source: Teaching Cancer Biology Through a Card Game: How Tumor Tactics Brought Oncology to San Diego's K-8 Classrooms - ASCB (ascb.org). Spotted via Nice News.
Written by the HappyGood desk from the primary source linked above and checked against it. Every story links its source. Corrections: [email protected].
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