Karen Jackman
A new computer game designed to make Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution fun for biology students has earned an international award for its South African inventor.
For the average 18-year-old, stepping into a new life as a university student does not involve donning a biohazard suit, digging up the missing link or tracking down the antidote for a killer virus. But for the young prodigies in Professor Alan Amory’s first-year biology class, this is the least they can expect. Amory, associate professor in Biology at the University of Natal, Durban, and self- confessed “techno freak”, is the inventor of Zadarh.
Zadarh, an anagram for hazard, is a unique new adventure computer game focusing on the early evolution of mankind. Instead of grappling with complicated theories in a traditional laboratory, as students always did in the past, Amory’s class log on to their computers and immerse themselves in evolutionary principals using Nineties technology. Captivated in a virtual world on an island, students dressed in biohazard suits have to track down a virus antidote.
“The inventor of a killer virus is killed when the virus escapes,” explains Amory. “Racing against time, the lone biologist – the student – searches for the clues to develop the antidote. The biologist investigates a library and two other rooms collecting information in the form of books, newspaper cuttings and photographs, items like a key, a spade and two skulls, and solving puzzles.”
Students are, in effect, studying the evidence that supports Darwin’s theories. The mystery is solved once a vial of the protein RNA, the final ingredient for the antidote, is found.
“And it should take a good student about two hours to crack,” laughs Amory as he reaches the vial in less than 15 minutes.
Zadarh has been so successful in effectively teaching students that it earned Amory a coveted international award at the World Conference on Education Multimedia and Hypermedia held in Freiburg, Germany. The conference received submissions from 46 countries focusing on education using multimedia tools.
Amory presented a detailed paper at the conference outlining the 18-month pilot project that involved designing the game and, most important for him, proving how effective it was as a teaching method.
Assisted by a team of three, Kevin Naicker (postgraduate student), Jackie Vincent (graphic artist) and Claudia Adams (research assistant), he started the Zadarh project by determining what students enjoyed in a computer game. The information was then used to develop the game.
“We had 58 students in the study and each student played a game for two hours. This was followed by a practical test of the knowledge they had gained,” he says. “People have always said games that work best are simulation games. We found that simulation games were the worst! The students liked adventure and strategy games. This is supported by the fact that most of the top selling games are either strategy or adventure games. The top selling game in the world is an adventure game called Myst.”
The game was then developed along a series of steps.
“Zadarh is aimed at solving very specific problems, including human evolution, the processes of photosynthesis, genetics, and 3D visualisation,” says Amory.
The process involved working out a storyline, puzzles, building computer three-dimensional rooms and generating the programmes.
“There are quite a few games available for kids, but not many for adults. There’s no violence involved and it’s a very politically correct game actually. I have also included different facets of cultures. Local South African art has been used on the walls of the virtual library. There is a need to widen young people’s minds.”
The pilot game was authored to run on Windows 3.1, but is designed in such a way that 3D virtual worlds can be created for the Windows 95 platform. Once the game was complete, the professor presented it to his students and asked them what would motivate them to play it.
“Only 10% answered that they would play it simply to meet a course requirement,” he said, “and we found that students had learnt just as much as they would have from traditional laboratory work.”
Amory and his team are presently hard at work on “level two” of the game. He is only using the game for his own students, but hopes in the future that other universities will be able to enter the virtual world.
The professor has been tinkering with computers ever since he bought a home computer 12 years ago. “I’m a complete techno-freak,” he says. “And combining biology with technology made sense. It was also important to come up with something that motivates students to learn.
“Playing games is an important part of our social and mental development. Games appear to motivate students and represent one of the best uses of multimedia in education”
Graphics for Zadarh were created in 3D-Studio Max (Kinetics) and the game- engine in Delphi (Borland). Where necessary, graphics were edited in Photoshop (Adobe). The game was created using tools developed in-house that added navigation and other elements to each game page and which created the game files. The game player was programmed to read and display these game files.
The Zadarh information page can be found on the web at