UW Madison Science festivals

The game involved a kid with a utensil finding "food" (beans, lentils) and scooping the food into a red solo cup ("stomach") while avoiding the non-food (rice, dirt). The game typically lasted thirty seconds to a minute, and there were several variables we could change in order to teach students about predator-prey dynamics. For example, the size of the prey, beans being larger than lentils, could change. The foraging strategy (i.e., use of a plastic fork, spoon, or knife) could change. The color of the prey to the substrate could change (i.e., lentils on dirt are harder to find compared to beans than lentils on rice).

At first, we anticipated that kids would leave with several take-aways. They would become familiar with camouflage, natural selection, foraging strategies, and that prey affect predators as predators affect prey. However, it was impossible to engage each visitor on all these topics. The age range of those who approached the booth and the amount of time they decided to stay were highly variable, and so our teaching became opportunistic.

For example, if one kid found more lentils in the white rice compared to the brown dirt, we could segue to talking about camouflage. If one kid collected beans or lentils from only the top layer of the rice, we could talk about prey behavior and natural selection (i.e., the ones that are buried or hidden escape being eaten). Or if a group showed up, we could give each a different utensil, or compare the rice and the dirt environments, and conduct 'experiments' as to which was easier and why.

Another unexpected result of the game was that parents were sometimes more engaged than their children. Children acted as an excuse for parents to play around in the rice and dirt and talk about evolution with some graduate students at UW Madison.

Over time, we have not changed the activity much due to the engagement of the participants but we now account for groups of kids and parents playing by decreasing the time of each game so that each participant will stay for multiple iterations (closer to thirty seconds is more than enough to emphasize our take-home messages and engage participants in trying variations on the game).