Nucleogenesis! is a game with natural rules designed to
familiarize students with nuclear reactions and the general "geography"
of the table of nuclear isotopes. Nucleogenesis! gives students
extensive practice in manipulating nuclear reactions because the mechanics
of the game require players to repeatedly calculate the outcome of nuclear
reactions such as alpha and beta decays and fusions of nuclei with protons,
neutrons, or alpha particles. The game board itself is a truncated
table of nuclear isotopes. During the game, students will become
familiar with the location of the "valley of stability" and the characteristic
decay modes on each side of it. A more complete discussion of this game
appears in the Journal of Chemical Education 76, 349-352 (1999).
Permission is given to reproduce the game from this site for classroom use only.
The files are in Adobe's PDF format.
(The free Acrobat Reader and PDFViewer browser plug-in are available,
for Mac, PC, and Unix platforms, from Adobe.)
You need both to play!
Other chemical education initiatives and research interests
of the Herzfeld group are summarized on
our home page.