The Mandal group is actively developing board games, computer games, and simulators to lower the barrier to understanding quantum mechanics.
The photo is from an outreach event at Texas A&M, where high school students joined us for a tense quantum tournament.
Our group has created a board game that plays by the rules of quantum mechanics. In Quantum Ninjas vs. Laser Robots, the ninjas disguise their whereabouts by spatially delocalizing (their wavefunction), while a stash of quantized photons lets them hop between states. The laser robot hunts them down by “observing”—rolling a die to collapse the wavefunction and (maybe!) catch a ninja, all in true quantum style.
Board layout of Quantum Ninjas vs. Laser Robots. Robots are placed in the gray boxes at the bottom of the board, and the ninja is placed in one of the blue boxes on the left, each representing an energy level. The game also includes a 20-sided die, photon coins and an emission card. Read more: Ref. [Amini et. al.]