Reflection

Final Product

The most successful aspect of the game I think is the design of it. I am not an artist and I don't have a lot of experience with graphic design so I was worried about the design aspect of the game. I spent two full days looking at designs and templates in Canva before deciding on the one I chose, and then I spent several hours alone on searching for graphics for the cards that looked nice and were in similar styles. I also feel like the eggs turned out very successfully. I originally had designed like paper tokens to use for the game but I decided I wanted the tokens to be three dimensional. Initially I had spent some time on designing them in tinkercad but the style wasn't what I wanted. Then I remembered I had white air dry clay and I thought I'd try it. Overall I am very happy with how the design of the different aspects of the game turned out and I'm very proud of myself for making something that looks good despite not being an artist. 

Hard Fun

I believe that playing Survival of the Fittest leads to hard fun. To be successful at the game it's a mix of strategy and luck. The strategy aspects are found in the environment, adaptation, competition, and predation cards. The Environment and Adaptation cards require you to read and understand the content on the card and make connections to deduce which cards are going to be most effective in each pairing. For example, it doesn't make sense to take the swimming adaptation if you're playing in the desert, but if you're not paying attention to how the cards are connected it's easy to take that card because it's interesting or a trait a person might want. The competition cards require you to compete against other players in mini games. These cards require strategy because you want to chose your opponent carefully and select someone you could definitely beat. The predation cards require you to use your brain to solve riddles and outsmart predators. I think all of these aspects in addition to the random encounters you face each turn creates hard fun where the player is not totally sure that they are going to succeed. 

Having this aspect of hard fun in the game I think could be crucial in creating interest in the evolution unit as well as encouraging students to want to understand connections. When playing the game with my family they had questions in which they wanted to understand how all the different cards were connected and my step father even remarked that this game made him more interested in understanding the connection between reproduction and evolution.

Classroom Application/Conceptual Learning

In my thought process of creating a game I knew I wanted to teach students about evolution and the importance of traits to survival. I also knew that I wanted to teach a game that would teach students about how we measure evolution through the lense of reproduction. The changing of traits and the ability to adapt are important aspects of evolution but ultimately these beneficial traits will be useless if an organism can not then reproduce and pass those traits onto the next generation. 

I think in the classroom this game would best be utilized as an introduction to the concept of survival of the fittest and it's ties to reproduction or as a summative activity to give kids a hands-on example of the concepts working together. I think that the game on it's own would not be able to teach the concept of survival of fittest because the game doesn't teach you what an adaptation or mutation is, but it does use these concepts to evolve your character and "reproduce". 

This game would be able to reinforce the connection between evolution and reproduction because to win you have to have the most eggs and the way you receive the most eggs is through your adaptation cards being in sync with the environment and receiving favorable conditions that allow your character to thrive. When reviewing a teacher can discuss with students how the winner in this game won because they had the best traits and the best outcome cards that allowed them to gather the most eggs and have the most offspring. 

If used to introduce these concepts in lecture portions of lessons or in activities with students you can bring up the different cards from the game and what the students had to do with each card and connect that back to the concept that is being taught. You can use the mechanic of gaining or losing egg tokens to demonstrate how adaptations can be helpful or harmful, you can also refer to the cards that are environment specific to show how the usefulness of a trait varies on the location of the organism. Overall this game works as a supplement to the classroom to reenforce the skills that they would need to know during a Living Enviroment or Biology course.