7/28/2023 0 Comments The game of life instructions 2020![]() One student wrote “I think it going to do good cause we can protect each other,” referring to the fact that their animal was social and lived in a group. Students predicted how their animal would perform in this environment. ![]() In the first scenario, sharks eat half of the population. Now the fun begins with natural selection! Some of the animals are not able to survive and reproduce in each of the three rounds of the game. Because every student drew an animal with unique traits, there is variation in the population (Figure 3.1, p. Students drew their interpretation of their animal in the coral reef habitat provided (Figure 2B). Each student flipped his/her coin to determine his/her animal’s characteristics in five basic categories: coloration (bright vs. 56, an example from one students’ activity booklet. In our class, two groups decided to be sharks, while other groups chose starfish, turtles, jellyfish, seahorses, and fish. As a group, students determined the type of aquatic animal that they wanted to be-each student played the game as a different individual in a population of animals. Students formed groups of four players and each group received a bag of materials: four coins, a die, colored pencils, and four activity booklets (see Supplemental Resources). By developing the program through our partnership, we were provided the means to ensure that the language and execution of the game could be understood by a range of students regardless of educational background. We had an existing partnership with a school in Greeley, Colorado, where fourth graders had no science background and were from a community that is 90% English as a second language. Furthermore, we developed the program with fourth-grade students as they are in the middle of the recommended range, grades 3–5. This allowed for us to provide a needed learning tool at the earliest educational point possible for the topic. We specifically targeted our program to grades 3–5 because it is at this point that evolution by natural selection is included as a standard for the first time (NGSS Lead States 2013). Our overall goal for this game was to expose students to the key elements of evolution by natural selection: variation, inheritance, selection, and time (See Figure 1 for learning objectives). Elementary school students are especially receptive to games as a non-traditional teaching method because their generation has grown up with a saturation of technology and gaming (Oblinger 2004). Drawing reinforces concepts through emphasis on students’ hands-on interaction with the material (Ainsworth, Prain, and Tytler 2011) and games result in greater retention of concepts because students are more engaged (Oblinger 2004). We created a self-guided, story-like game with creative drawing for grades 3–5 that teaches the evolution concepts of adaptation, natural selection, ecosystem dynamics, inheritance, and mutation following the NGSS (See Connecting to the NGSS on p. 2009) and elementary-level learning is facilitated by programs that are “story-like, hands-on, active, student-creative, and fun” (Fail 2008). Inquiry activities are effective (Minner, Levy, and Century 2010 Nadelson et al. ![]() ![]() Therefore, we are in need of engaging teaching resources that are based on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Unfortunately, many elementary school teachers are not prepared to teach evolution (Glaze and Goldston 2015) in part because evolution by natural selection has not been part of elementary school curriculum until recently (NGSS Lead States 2013). Excitingly, we now know that students are capable of understanding evolution in elementary school and that early exposure reduces misconceptions and leads to more positive attitudes toward evolution (Nadelson et al. ![]() Evolutionary approaches are helping us solve important problems like antibiotic resistance in medicine, crop breeding in agriculture, and mitigation of the effects of climate change in the environmental sciences. ![]()
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