An Interactive Game Approach to Learning in Historical Geology and Paleontology
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These materials were reviewed using face-to-face NSF-style review panel of geoscience and geoscience education experts to review groups of resources addressing a single theme. Panelists wrote reviews that addressed the criteria:
- scientific accuracy and currency
- usability and
- pedagogical effectiveness
- Accept
- Accept with minor revisions
- Accept with major revisions, or
- Reject.
Following the panel meetings, the conveners wrote summaries of the panel discussion for each resource; these were transmitted to the creator, along with anonymous versions of the reviews. Relatively few resources were accepted as is. In most cases, the majority of the resources were either designated as 1) Reject or 2) Accept with major revisions. Resources were most often rejected for their lack of completeness to be used in a classroom or they contained scientific inaccuracies.
This page first made public: Nov 4, 2004
This material was originally created for
Starting Point:Introductory Geology and is replicated here as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service.
Summary
Learning Goals
This game is intended to:
- Make memorization and assessment tasks fun
- Encourage interaction among students
- Through weekly practice, and gradual addition of new fossils into the game, enable students to expand their knowledge, rather than forgetting what they had learned last week to make room for the new taxa of the following week.
Context for Use
Description and Teaching Materials
The game "evolves" over time. New rules and are added each lab, as are new phyla. This keeps the complexity of the game from overwheming the students until they are already familiar with many of the rules and allows them to focus on learning their taxa (essential to winning!). Also suggestions from students were considered, which made students contributors to the game as well as players.
Rules
- The first iteration of the game is a "fossil bee", an identification contest.
- Divide the students into two teams
- Break out a collection of fossils for them to identify
- Choose a randomly-chosen student to identify the first fossil.
- The next time, the students who answer correctly get to draw a Bonus Card, with a question about a particular fossil whose image is on the card. Questions include:
- Naming a labelled part of a fossil
- Identifying the time range of the taxon depicted
- Instead of having the instructor note wrong answers, allow the opponent to challenge a suspect answer and get the points if they can make a correct identification.
- Instead of selecting a fossil to be identified based on its position on the table, roll a die to determine which one is used.
- Eventually, break the class into teams of two and have them compete individually against the other member of the pair. Have each student keep score for their competitor.
- The instructors eventually add a game board based on the geologic timescale, and arrange the fossils in chronological order.
- After a student identifies a fossil, under the tray are clues to help them solve "puns and riddles" questions about specific geologic time units.
- The score can be tracked with "trilobucks". These can be spent to help students get around the board, now made increasingly difficult by "mass extinctions" at the end of each era.
- The addition of "orogeny" and "eustasy" pieces to the game board gives the students a chance to win more trilobucks by identifying orogeny events or sea level curves for a given time unit that they have reached on the board.
- The final rule added to the game: students must pay their opponents when they make incorrect answers.
