USING HUMAN COMPUTATION TO ASSIST BIOLOGICALLY INSPIRED DESIGN: EVALUATING A GAME-WITH-A-PURPOSE

摘要

Locating relevant biological analogies is a challenge that lies at the heart of practicing biologically inspired design. One promising solution involves computationally providing relevant inspiration to the designer. This paper presents a novel human computation game for collecting computable descriptions of biological strategies, an assessment of the quality of these descriptions gathered from experimental data, and an evaluation of the game's user experience. This human computation approach to collecting and organizing biological phenomena improves upon the breadth of curated database approaches without sacrificing the accuracy afforded by human reasoning skills. The Biology Phenomenon Categorizer (BioP-C); a cooperative, asymmetric, online game; was deployed in a small engineering graduate class in order to collect assertions about the biological phenomenon of cell division. Through the course of playing, the students formed assertions describing key concepts in the passage. These assertions are assessed for their factual correctness, and these correctness ratings are used to identify directly measurable indicators of assertion truth. Areas for improved game design are also identified.