Tues Jan 12 // Dr. David Ng // AMBL, Michael Smith Laboratories, UBC

Dr. David Ng
AMBL, Michael Smith Laboratories, University of British Columbia
The Phylo Trading Card Game: A crowdsourced game-based learning approach to biodiversity education

The Phylo Trading Card game is an exercise in crowdsourced game design with the explicit intent of introducing biodiversity and other STEM concepts to its players. The Phylo game is a competitive and interactive way for participants to engage with species and ecosystems. This seminar will talk about the origins and progression of the project as a tool for STEM related game-based learning.  The talk will also briefly mention a pilot study that revolved around human perceptions of wildlife and identifying whether such perceptions may be altered by using the game as a potential tool. Utilizing an in-lab study design, this research identified the impact of this novel educational approach and compared it to more traditional teaching methods across criteria including ecological perceptions, knowledge, positive and negative affect, and species recall.