Would you like to introduce your students to particle physics through games? Do you have some spare time at the end of the year and need something educational to occupy your students? Do you love both board games and particle physics?
Particle Builder is a particle physics board game developed by Lachlan McGinness, Harri Leinonen, and Rowan McGinness. The game is designed to familiarize students (aged 16-18 years) in groups of 2-3 players with the elementary particles in the Standard Model. The game involves playing cards representing elementary particles and comparing their properties. As players advance through the stages, they encounter additional rules that mimic the behavior of real elementary particles.
Students learn about particle properties, particle categories, and the process of annihilation while practicing particle physics terminology.
Students explore the strong and electromagnetic interactions, discovering which particles they act upon.
This stage introduces the concept of color charge, teaching students that all hadrons are color neutral.
Students learn that particle interactions are probabilistic by nature, not governed by deterministic laws.
Warning! From Stage 5 onwards, the rules become more complex, and additional cards are required.
Students explore the types of transformations allowed by the Standard Model.
In this stage, students learn about neutrino oscillations and discover that the mass eigenstates of neutrinos differ from their flavor eigenstates.
This stage is highly complex. The rules become so complicated that it’s best to “run away while you still can and enjoy life!”