Quantum Penny Flip: an open source serious game for quantum computing assessment

Abstract

Quantum computing bases on the exploitation of quantum mechanics to create computation systems. It inherits its benefits from quantum mechanics, but also its difficulties: quantum mechanics are counter-intuitive and hard to learn or even accept, even for its iconic mentors. This makes teaching quantum computing very challenging. Serious games are games with a serious purpose, such as learning, training or social awareness. The present work describes the development of a serious game for the purpose of learning quantum computing concepts. It deals with qubits, qubit states, superposition and the flip and Hadamard gates. The game was made freely available to play with few system requirements to get to a broad audience. Also, its source code was made publicly available to modify and redistribute with no strings attached. The authors feel that the objectives of this work were met, but there is further work to be done regarding the evaluation and improvement of the game.