This summer, with support from the ASCB COMPASS Outreach Program, STEAMLabs International ran five Tumor Tactics cancer biology workshops across San Diego, reaching 150 students at Deer Canyon Elementary School, Pacific Highlands Ranch Branch Library, and Encanto Elementary School. Every student who attended went home with a free complete Tumor Tactics kit. 95% of students improved their score on a five-question cancer biology quiz from the start to the end of the session.
What Is Tumor Tactics?
Tumor Tactics is a card game STEAMLabs International designed to teach K-8 students how doctors think through cancer treatment. Every player is a doctor managing a patient with three active tumors: Lung, Colon, and Skin. On each turn, players choose which treatment card to play and which tumor to target. A Colonoscopy card deals 4 damage to the Colon tumor but only 2 to others, reflecting how targeted screening works best when matched to the right cancer type. Chemotherapy can hit any tumor but requires a die roll, mirroring how broad treatments carry real clinical uncertainty. Event cards like New Carcinogen force cancer cards back into the deck, and IT Outage scrambles every player’s hand, simulating the unpredictable complications oncologists navigate every day. Utility cards like Second Opinion and Advance Screening reward planning ahead, just like preventive care does in the real world. The first doctor to move all three tumors to the Cured pile wins.
The game was designed by Daniel Zhang, a rising senior at Canyon Crest Academy in San Diego who conducts cancer biology research at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center (NOTCH signaling, 1,450+ patient samples) and Cambridge University’s Cancer Research Institute (bladder cancer multi-omics). Daniel designed Tumor Tactics after his grandmother passed away from stage 3 pancreatic cancer, and card games were the thing that brought him back from two years of grief and isolation. The idea was to take the science he was doing in real labs and put it in a format that any third grader could pick up and play. Learn more at playtumortactics.com or follow @playtumortactics on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Workshop 1: Deer Canyon Elementary School — June 27, 2026
The first workshop took place in a fourth and fifth grade classroom at Deer Canyon Elementary School (14010 Carmel Valley Rd, San Diego, CA 92130), a school where STEAMLabs has been running full-day science programming since 2024. Thirty students split into groups of 3-4, each group working through their patient’s tumors with the focused energy of kids who had figured out the rules faster than expected.
The debrief after gameplay produced some of the most direct questions of the series. One student looked up mid-conversation and asked:
“So the die roll is like whether the chemo actually works?” — 5th grader, Deer Canyon Elementary
That question is exactly what the game is designed to generate. Yes: the die roll is like whether the chemo actually works. Some rounds it does. Some rounds it does not. That is not a flaw in the game. That is the point.
The hosting teacher noted afterward: “They were actually arguing about which treatment card to play. I have not seen that kind of engagement in a while.”
Workshops 2 and 3: Pacific Highlands Ranch Branch Library — July 12 and 18, 2026
Two sessions were held at the Pacific Highlands Ranch Branch Library (13396 Evening Creek Dr N, San Diego, CA 92130), where STEAMLabs previously organized a two-day summer science camp that raised $1,200 for Scripps Hospital. The library’s community room filled quickly both days, with families bringing students ranging from 3rd through 8th grade, many of whom had signed up after seeing the co-branded STEAMLabs and ASCB flyer posted at the library’s front desk or through the ParentSquare community board.
The mixed-age dynamic created something unexpected: older students naturally took on facilitator roles at their tables, explaining card mechanics to younger siblings sitting next to them. One fourth grader, visibly frustrated after losing two consecutive turns to a Stage 4 Lung tumor that would not respond to treatment, asked:
“Why can’t I just use targeted therapy on everything?” — 4th grader, Pacific Highlands Ranch Library
That question opened a five-minute table-level conversation about why oncologists do not simply use the strongest treatment on every cancer: specificity, side effects, resistance. Nobody at the table had been told to have that conversation. The youth services librarian told us afterward: “A few families stayed after to ask where their kids could learn more.”
Workshops 4 and 5: Encanto Elementary School — August 2 and 8, 2026
The final two workshops were held at Encanto Elementary School (970 Elmdale Rd, San Diego, CA 92114), a Title I SDUSD campus in southeastern San Diego where over 80% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. STEAM enrichment at Title I schools in San Diego is systematically thinner than at well-resourced schools nearby: fewer after-school programs, reduced science instruction time, and almost no access to hands-on biology experiences before high school. These sessions were the ones that mattered most to us.
Thirty students per session. By the end of both Encanto workshops, the cohort outperformed the series average on the quiz question asking students to explain why tumor staging affects treatment difficulty. One sixth grader said during the debrief:
“I did not know cancer had different types that needed different treatments.” — 6th grader, Encanto Elementary
The fifth grade science teacher who hosted both sessions wrote in her reflection: “The kids were still talking about it at lunch.”
What ASCB COMPASS Funding Made Possible
The ASCB COMPASS Outreach Grant funded the full production run of 100 Tumor Tactics kits: 100 printed card decks (72 cards each), 100 tumor token sets (56 tokens each), 100 card boxes and sleeves, 100 rulebooks, 100 dice, and all packaging materials, as well as snacks for all five sessions. Without this funding, we could not have distributed kits at no cost to students. Those kits go home. They get played again. They reach siblings and parents and cousins who were never in the room. We are deeply grateful to ASCB and the COMPASS Outreach Program for making this series possible.
What’s Next
Across five workshops and 150 students, one piece of feedback came up consistently: some of the scientific terminology on the cards was too advanced for younger students in grades 3 and 4. Words like “carcinogen,” “immunotherapy,” and “metastasis” appeared without phonetic support or definitions. We are adding a glossary sheet to the next Tumor Tactics production run, with every term phonetically spelled out and defined in plain language, so a third grader can look up “che-mo-ther-a-py” before playing the card.
We are also planning to expand the workshop series into additional Title I schools across SDUSD in fall 2026, and to train STEAMLabs chapter members in Texas, Alabama, and Kenya to run Tumor Tactics workshops independently using the facilitation guide we developed this summer.
To learn more about Tumor Tactics, visit playtumortactics.com or follow @playtumortactics on Instagram and LinkedIn. To learn more about STEAMLabs International, visit steamlabsintl.org or follow @steamlabs_official on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Funding for the Tumor Tactics Cancer Biology Workshop Series was provided by the ASCB COMPASS Outreach Program (Grant #179665).
About the Author:
Daniel Zhang, Co-Founder and National President, STEAMLabs International
