Scientific Hangman: Gamifying Scientific Evidence for General Public

Governmental and private funding for research in many fields has resulted in a significant body of scientific evidence. Scientific evidence or content is made available in the form of thousands of articles communicated via digital libraries. This evidence is principally used by researchers, students and on occasions for societal impact such as commercial exploitation and popular science communication. How can we gamify communicating a large amount of scientific evidence to the general public? This is the question that intrigues us. We present the game of Scientific Hangman, based on the traditional game of hangman, to communicate scientific research in a fun manner. The puzzles in our game are based on automatic summarization of scientific article abstracts. Players play the game in an attempt to guess a word given a clue such as a paper abstract. Our first prototype, was evaluated on a focus group at the Cancer Registry of Norway by communicating information from invitation letters in cervical cancer screening. We also evaluated a second prototype of the game to have feedback on design improvements resulted from the first prototype.