Hi everyone,
I was watching a presentation on adopting alternative teaching methods across disciplines today. One of the topics was cladograms. All you paleo/biologists out there have a love/hate relationship with those, I'm sure. The purpose of cladograms is to organize evolutionary relationships between organisms in a coherent manner.
[http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/89/cladogram.gif/]
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So the speaker was talking about various activities tried including "The Great Cladogram Race" (I think) and an idea popped into my head. That would be a great opportunity to use videogames to aid in teaching! Spore has a creature creator that allows you to mold/form your critter, attach limbs in varying numbers and locations, along with mouths,ears, etc. Advancing through the growth stages, adding/changing parts, and then screenshoting them for comparison in a cladogram could help students better understand cladogram relationships and diagrams.
There are potential issues, such as the cost of the full version, technical issues, logistics,etc. So maybe it's not ideal for most professors. That aside I think it's still doable and would help students interested in relevant biology/paleontology fields.
I'll have to credit extra credits for the inspiration of course. I liked their discussion of using videogames to help teach/learn. I felt I'd share this so maybe it would help some teachers and students out there either with cladograms specifically or with ideas for how to better understand other concepts out there. Feel free to discuss, comment, critique, thieve the idea or whatever. Also do you have an idea for how to use videogames as teaching aides?
I was watching a presentation on adopting alternative teaching methods across disciplines today. One of the topics was cladograms. All you paleo/biologists out there have a love/hate relationship with those, I'm sure. The purpose of cladograms is to organize evolutionary relationships between organisms in a coherent manner.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us [http://imageshack.us]
So the speaker was talking about various activities tried including "The Great Cladogram Race" (I think) and an idea popped into my head. That would be a great opportunity to use videogames to aid in teaching! Spore has a creature creator that allows you to mold/form your critter, attach limbs in varying numbers and locations, along with mouths,ears, etc. Advancing through the growth stages, adding/changing parts, and then screenshoting them for comparison in a cladogram could help students better understand cladogram relationships and diagrams.
There are potential issues, such as the cost of the full version, technical issues, logistics,etc. So maybe it's not ideal for most professors. That aside I think it's still doable and would help students interested in relevant biology/paleontology fields.
I'll have to credit extra credits for the inspiration of course. I liked their discussion of using videogames to help teach/learn. I felt I'd share this so maybe it would help some teachers and students out there either with cladograms specifically or with ideas for how to better understand other concepts out there. Feel free to discuss, comment, critique, thieve the idea or whatever. Also do you have an idea for how to use videogames as teaching aides?