The Unforgettable April
April was a very important month for the ScienceAtHome project. Our research was about to be published in the scientific journal Nature and as project leader, Jacob Sherson, put it, this was sort of like winning the Champions League final.
You can read more about implications of the Nature article here.
We all waited impatiently for the day to come, however, little did we know, it was about to exceed all our expectations. Already after the first few days we counted more than 100 articles worldwide talking about Machine vs. Human, gamification, citizen science and of course Quantum Moves!
The Verge, Gizmodo, DailyMail, ArsTechnica — just to mention a few. Media talked and people listened; our app was downloaded more than 67.4k times.
New Players
As a result, in April alone we welcomed 100k new players! Which is 10 times more than in the previous years combined!
On average each user played 10 min per day. Our web developers slept with one eye open, constantly checking if the servers were doing fine. So did the rest of the team. Even after long hours at work we couldn’t stop checking the social media and Google analytics, all showing people joining from all over the world. In fact, if we were to colour the map of all our visitors, we would cover almost the whole globe! People were playing our games and sharing their high scores and strategies.
Reaching 5M gameplays
We also knew that to comprehend our research methods all at once is a lot to take in, so we created a stop motion video to explain how your game plays convert into our research! The video was a huge success — as of today, our YouTube channel has 55,8k views.
Finally, if you follow us on social media (Facebook and Twitter), you can’t have missed what has happened regarding our community goal. This was a part where our players exceeded even the dreamiest best-case scenarios. Our initial goal was 50k gameplays and it was crushed the same day. Then we raised it to 10 times the original goal and in 24 hours it was crushed again! Long story short, within a few days we have gathered more data than in the previous project years combined!
On May 2nd, Quantum Moves had been played 5M times, which is 100 times more than our initial goal.
Every single time you play our games matters a great deal! Every gameplay is a tiny step further in our research. We can’t thank you enough for this overwhelming support!
April was unforgettable, but there are still a lot of scientific frontiers to be conquered!
Originally published at blog.scienceathome.org.
