Potions!

In Potions!, an evil wizard has cursed the creatures of the land with various ailments. Being (somewhat) skilled in potions, the player will take on the duty of curing the victims. Unfortunately, magic is complex and players need to do some experimenting to get it right. To be successful and save as many fantastical creatures as possible, players must learn to select appropriate parameters and correctly interpret the results of experiments.

Potions! teaches inferential logics and hypothesis testing by having students run authentic experiments in a fantastical setting. In this puzzle game, players are armed with a variety of potions representing the dependent variables of an experiment. Each potion has a different effect. To know the effect, students will conduct trials on the target population and compare the results of a pair of potions using a t-test. To complete the game, students must negotiate the tradeoffs between available resources, study accuracy, and danger to participants.

Potions! is intended to be used in college-level introduction statistics classes across multiple disciplines. Include it in your own lesson or use ours, called “Do Placebos Kill Minotaurs?” which can be found at https://learn.k20center.ou.edu/lesson/326 .