Ron Capurso and Sara Yerger

Educational Game Lesson Critique: “Survival”

Playing this game was an interesting and unique experience. We wished we had had more time to play it to get a better feel for how the outcome should have been had we played it for longer. Overall we feel this is a fun game, but a lot of changes would need to be made for it to be truly educational to students.

First, the directions are not very clear. We do not even know what grade level this game is designed for, since we (as college students) even struggled with it. Based on the PA Standards, we will assume that it was designed for 7^th grade students since it attempts to address some of the concepts outlined in 3.3.7C and D. A potential flaw in the game was using decimals; one would have to ensure that their students knew how to multiply decimals in their head before playing this game, because there was certainly a lot of math involved. In fact, there was almost too much focus on math as opposed to the science of ecology.

The “Disperse Seeds” command was very confusing, since it listed the possibility of “Reproduce & Disperse Seeds” under this heading but there was no such command on the spinner. We chose to use the “Reproduce & Disperse Seeds” command in place of all “Disperse Seeds” commands because we did not know how you could really disperse without reproducing first. However, this caused there to be a lot of focus on reproduction, which perhaps the game was designed for, but we feel that there was too much focus on reproduction and not much else. The game was heavily weighted such that if you had a good reproduction rate, you would automatically succeed in the game, whereas if you had a poor reproduction rate, you would almost certainly automatically fail. There are a lot more factors in the gene pool than reproduction rate, so this should have been mitigated slightly.

The “Compete” command did not have its intended effects. It was extremely difficult to accomplish for any of the members of the group playing the game and felt more like a wasted turn. Perhaps if we had more time to play the game it would have gotten easier as species reproduced exponentially. The overall point of the command did make sense, however, since the competing species could only out-compete the other species if the land was its optimal habitat and it had more individuals than the other species.

While the “Change Genes” command seemed useful to those who did not have good genes, it does not make a lot of sense with regards to teaching students. To the players, it seems like this would be a good strategy to help win the game, but it does not outline the scientific reasoning behind how this could happen in real life. In terms of the game, we thought it would have been interesting if the players could steal each other’s genes, but this would not be entirely scientifically sound either. It is difficult to think of a way to make this command work and still teach students how this would actually work in real life. Since we did not realize that “Choose Any Command” included this one (since there were no “Change Genes” spaces on the spinner), this command was not an issue until the end when we realized how much of a difference it could have made had we known to use it earlier.

This game addressed some of PA Standards 3.3.7C and D as well as points in NSES 6.3: Life Science Standards. We could clearly tell that the game was intended to directly address PA Standard 3.3.7D as there are points in this standard that are almost word for word in the game, such as “Describe how an environmental change can affect the survival of organisms and entire species.” This particular factor in the Standard was addressed quite well through the game’s “Environmental Change” cards, especially since there were cards that affected individual species and cards that affected all species. We felt this was the most interesting aspect to the game.

Another bullet of this Standard that was addressed effectively was “Recognize that populations of organisms can increase rapidly.” Despite the challenge of multiplying decimals and following the rules of reproduction carefully, this point of the Standard was certainly quite evident in the game if one species had a high or even average reproduction rate. However, to more fully understand this, students would need extra instruction as to exactly how and why certain organisms can reproduce faster than others (i.e. it is not arbitrarily picked by a card).

One factor that was not addressed was how organisms adapt, mutate, go extinct, etc. It might be that we simply did not get the cards that would indicate this, and/or it might be that we did not play long enough to experience these. It was evident through the “Tolerance” cards that certain traits would protect plants from certain environmental changes; however, it was not evident how these traits came about since they were simply cards selected by the players. The scientific principles of adaptation and mutation would need to be taught prior to the game to make this effective. We also learned nothing about extinction, but this is probably because we did not play the game long enough. However, this would be something that must be taken into consideration given the typical length of class periods and how many classes the teacher would be willing to devote just to playing this game.

Students would need to learn a lot more background about adaptations, inheritance, mutation, environmental change, and other factors in ecology and evolution before and/or after playing this game for it to be effective. When playing the game, we could identify certain aspects of the game that were useful in teaching these concepts, but this is probably because we already know the concepts that are being taught. To a 7^th grade student, this might just be a fun game and nothing more. While the game is fun and unique, it must be supplemented with instruction from the teacher to make it useful in learning the principles of ecology and evolution.