Dungeons and Dragons—And Chemistry
Graduate student Skyler Ware, standing back center, leads players through a science-inspired Dungeons and Dragons quest.
by Julia EhlerT
In the far-flung town of Terensby, seven adventurers were summoned to solve a mystery. Locks had been stolen, streetlamps smashed, and shovels, crowbars, and weapons taken—but no money was missing.
Skyler Ware, a chemistry graduate student at Caltech, set this scene for the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) players she had invited to join her at Odyssey Games Pasadena. For the next four hours, the group tracked down the culprits: monsters that were corroding the town’s iron into rust and eating it. The mystery—and the game module itself—were designed by Ware to share science knowledge through D&D, a fantasy tabletop role-playing game.
Ware’s unusual approach to science outreach was inspired by the STEM Ambassador Program (STEMAP), a public engagement training program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Ware completed a 10-week course with STEMAP as a requirement of NSF’s Center for Synthetic Organic Electrochemistry, which funds her research.
During the course, she developed her first engagement project: a D&D game incorporating elements of her research on battery science in the lab of Kimberly See, assistant professor of chemistry at Caltech.
“The STEM Ambassador Program has this focus on doing outreach in places where we don’t typically think about doing outreach,” Ware says. “A lot of folks think of doing outreach in schools, libraries, museums, science festivals, and that’s all very important. But there are people who don’t go to those spaces, who can’t go to those spaces.”
STEMAP encourages open-minded exchange and dialogue between scientists and members of the public rather than one-way communication. Ambassadors engage communities they are members of, and with which they have shared interests, experiences, or identities. Ware says she focused her outreach on the D&D community because she had organized games for several years and knew her friends were curious about her research. In her first project, she created a D&D game in which players had to figure out how to charge their battery-powered teleporters during the adventure. Afterward, Ware handed out a sheet that described the “anatomy of a battery” and the chemistry that makes it work.
“To people who didn’t have science long ago, the things that we do in the real world now are like magic,”
Her second outreach game encouraged players to think about chemistry through rust and iron while solving a mystery and tracking down monsters. After the game, she gave each player a handout that described the chemical reaction that creates rust and speculated how a monster could use electricity to corrode iron.
“This is one of the more unique D&D adventures I’ve been on; it was very cool,” said one of the players, Victoria Bian, who teaches English as a second language.
Dennis Lui, a K–12 educator who also participated in the game, said the role-playing experience lends itself naturally to scientific principles. “You’re doing a lot of investigation using logic and using all the tools at your disposal like lightning, the elements, and acid,” he said. “You can try to imagine the effect of what you’re using in the real world.”
In addition to their newfound chemistry knowledge, the participants said they valued the connections, fun, and inspiration that came out of the experience. “To people who didn’t have science long ago, the things that we do in the real world now are like magic,” Lui said. “So in a lot of ways, it’s fun to explore both magic and science in D&D.”