ISSS science week goes online with in-house arcade games, crepes, and trivia

Aside from the tradition of running during the second week of the winter semester, the Interdepartmental Science Students’ Society’s (ISSS) science week is looking a little different as it shifts to a fully online platform.

Every evening from January 18-22, ISSS will be hosting a virtual event, including trivia night, a speaker panel consisting of graduate and medical students, a Scribbl.io night, and a showing of the movie Interstellar. Students from any faculty can register for these events.

The week will also kick-off with a build-your-own crepe night, which has is already reached full registration. For this event, ISSS will drop off free artisanal crepe kits at students’ doors and show them how to cook the crepes over Zoom.

Jessica Bennett, fourth-year cell biology student and ISSS’s vice-president (programming) organized the virtual crepe night as homage to a Science Week in-person tradition.

“The crepe night aims to replace the pancake breakfast we usually do,” she said.

Taking Science Week classics online like the usual pancake breakfast wasn’t easy, but Bennett believes the team ultimately enjoyed the challenge.

“We had to take a lot of our events and adapt them for online like the pancake breakfast,” she said. “Taking it and making it into crepe night and figuring out how it would work logistically — same with our trivia night — was definitely a new challenge but our team had a lot of fun doing it and I think [students] will really like the product.”

Alongside nightly events, ISSS will also be debuting in-house arcade games. The ISSS’s Programming Committee re-created classic arcade games with a science twist. In the team’s re-creation of Flappy Bird, players will have to not only guide the bird through tubes, but will also need to answer science trivia correctly to determine which pair of tubes the bird should travel through.

“It adds that extra science-twist, but it also makes your favourite nostalgia games a little harder,” Bennett said.

“[Our Programming Committee] programmed the games from scratch and they have been working really hard to do it. They’re really excited to showcase their games.”

ISSS is also holding a science professor bracket on their Instagram where students can vote for their favourite science professor. Starting with 56 professors, the bracket is now down to the top 16 professors and the bracket will conclude during science week.

“A lot of people have been following the bracket, so I’m sure they will be very curious as to who ends up winning,” Bennett said.

Despite the challenges of bringing the Science Week online, Bennett emphasized its role in bringing the U of A science community together.

“The aim of Science Week is to provide a fun opportunity for science students to feel a sense of faculty pride outside of the classroom, to give them the opportunity to meet and interact with other science students… and to make them aware of ISSS and the services we’re able to offer them.”