Blood Type Game

thingiverse

This game has been developed by Matthew Barron (barronm@netzero.com). The game pieces have been designed in OpenSCAD by David Mott (dpmott). The following has been transcribed from the original PDF game description (see files). # ABO Blood Types: What is it and Why is it Important? This activity is best for 4 kids (4 kids, 4 blood types) I initially made the blood cells out of plaster, but the little projections were fragile. I made the antibodies out of Sculpey. The round blood cells have projections: triangles on Type A, rectangles on Type B, both rectangles and triangles on Type AB, and no projections on Type O. These projections represent the antigens on the blood cell. The antibodies are hexagons with indentations corresponding to their antigenic counterparts. Basically they are just puzzle pieces, which is exactly how they work in the body. The antibodies are not to scale, of course. Even with the red cells blown up to this size, they would still be very very tiny. <ol> <li>Explain what a blood cell is and why it is important. I had a paper mache red blood cell to demonstrate biconcave the shape, but that isn’t necessary. <li>Assign a blood type to the kids (if they know their blood type, then you can assign them that one). <li>Place the blood cells and antibodies in front of the kids according to what would be in their blood (see illustration). <li>Demonstrate how the pieces do not fit together (therefore do not produce an immune reaction) <li>Explain how immune reactions are bad and would destroy all the donated blood (and possibly gum up your kidneys and kill you etc.) <li>Assign the first kid an accident or disease condition that makes them anemic. <li>Ask the kids what type of blood we could donate to that person. Be patient. Let them play with the pieces and think it out. Some of them are tricky because more than one blood type is acceptable and in others only blood of the same type is acceptable. <li>Repeat this for the other blood types. Use a different disease condition or let the kids make up why they need a transfusion (I had one kid who was attacked by orcs while his mom had been bitten by a vampire. Don’t worry we saved them.) </ol> Surprisingly, the younger kids had an easier time with it. They looked at it as a puzzle, while the older kids thought it was science and therefore must be difficult. (See PDF for images)