Saving Physics Games from the Internet Graveyard
In December 2020, Adobe killed Flash. And with it, a generation of educational games quietly stopped working.
Quarked! Adventures in the Subatomic Universe is a physics education project from the University of Kansas — a collection of games, videos, and interactive tools designed to introduce kids aged 7–12 to the subatomic world. Quarks, electrons, protons, magnetic fields — concepts that don’t show up until high school or college, made tangible through play. The project had reached over 100,000 unique visitors and thousands of students. And most of it was built in Flash.
My job was to save it.
Learning Unity by Doing It
I had never used Unity before I started. Game development wasn’t something I’d studied — I was a physics and film student, not a computer science one. But by then I had learned enough from the CERN projects to know that the fastest way to learn a new tool is to have a real problem that requires it.
So I taught myself Unity. Forums, documentation, YouTube tutorials, trial and error. The same way I’d learned Python a year earlier — by needing to actually build something.
The games themselves were fascinating to work on. One had kids drag and drop quarks together to build protons and neutrons, then combine those into atoms of different elements. Another simulated how charged particles travel through magnetic fields — visualizing the curved paths that real detectors like CMS exploit to measure particle momentum. These weren’t trivial simplifications. They were genuine physics, just wrapped in something a ten-year-old could interact with. You can check them out in the Game Zone
Porting them from Flash to Unity meant rebuilding the mechanics from scratch in a new engine, optimizing performance so they’d run on mobile, and making sure the physics behavior — the thing that made them educational — stayed intact. It also meant writing proper technical documentation for the first time, something I came to appreciate more than I expected.
Where Three Things Met
I am a double major in Astronomy and Film & Media Studies. For most of my undergrad that felt like an awkward combination to explain — what does cinema have to do with particle physics?
Quarked! was the first place where it didn’t feel awkward at all.
Making a game about quarks for a seven-year-old requires you to think like a physicist and a storyteller simultaneously. The physics has to be right — or at least meaningfully right, not misleading. But the experience has to be designed around how a child actually engages with a screen: what they’ll click, what will hold their attention, what will make them feel like they accomplished something. That’s a media problem as much as a science problem.
I had spent time at CERN studying how particles behave in detectors. Here I was thinking about how to represent those same particles as characters a kid would want to interact with. The scale of the questions was completely different. The underlying interest — how do you communicate physics to someone who doesn’t yet speak the language — was exactly the same.
What It Left Me With
Quarked! runs on Unity now. The games work on WebGL, Android, and iOS. The Flash era is over and the content survived.
But what the experience really gave me was clarity about what I actually want to do. Physics is the subject. Film and media is the method. Education is the purpose. I don’t think of these as separate tracks I’m trying to reconcile — I think of them as three lenses that, pointed at the same problem, produce something none of them could alone.
Teaching a child what a quark is through a game they choose to play is harder than writing a paper about quarks. It’s also, in some ways, more important. Science that stays inside the scientific community doesn’t change how people think. Science that finds its way into the hands of a curious ten-year-old just might.