USING EDUCATIONAL BOARD GAMES TO ENHANCE LEARNING AND ENGAGEMENT IN PALEONTOLOGY AND GEOSCIENCES

‘Serious Games’ are active learning tools that can enhance problem solving and retention of material by facilitating cooperative learning, engagement, and enjoyment. Although they are effective tools across educational levels (e.g., elementary, high school, university), games are underutilized in Earth science classrooms, especially at the college level. Here we will discuss the goals, best practices, and benefits of using games to support paleontological education in college-level Geoscience classes.

The majority of data presented are from our work with “Taphonomy: Dead and Fossilized” (a fossilization board game). In “Taphonomy: Dead and Fossilized”, players are time travelers who compete against one another to protect and curate a fossil collection through geological time. They learn how physiology, depositional environment, physical and chemical changes during exposure, burial, and decomposition, as well as discovery biases can influence an organism’s preservation and collection potential. This game was assessed as an active learning tool in undergraduate geoscience classes (labs and lectures) as well as GeoFORCE Texas, a summertime out-of-school program for high school students (which is included here because many important lessons were learned observing the GeoFORCE students). Undergraduate surveys show that students and teachers were overwhelmingly positive about the game, stating that it was fun to play and helped them learn or strengthen their knowledge of fossilization. High school students played a simplified and more scaffolded game and were monitored using a modified observation protocol. After gameplay, students applied their knowledge to analyze simulated data, establish cause-effect relations, and broad Earth systems thinking questions. These students were engaged and strategizing during the activity and had a good synthetic understanding of concepts in follow-up activities.

It is critical to use educational games as part of a larger lesson plan and tailor them to fit the needs of an individual classroom. Using ‘lessons learned’ from the fossilization game, we present a new prototype game for teaching reef ecology and evolution. In “Reef Survivor” students build a reef community that evolves through time and faces a number of natural disasters.