I wrote a small web game for the “Week of Science 2012” (Semana de la Ciencia), a science divulgation initiative organized in Spain. I participated to it as a member in the Institut of Biologia Evolutiva of Barcelona, the institution to which I belong to. The game is in Spanish, but I think anybody can understand it without translation. Click on the image to play with it:
If the game is not shown correctly, click on this link: IBE phylogenetic game sc2012
In short, we had 15 minutes to explain to a class of college students (from 12 to 18 years old) how to make phylogenetic trees. This is how we organized the time:
- In the first five minutes, we had a short presentation explaining that we all come from a common ancestor, and that our work of evolutionary biologist is to reconstruct the tree of life. We also explained what a phylogenetic tree is, and how we reconstruct it.
- In the next three minutes, we played the first game. This game was quite easy, and was meant to check if the student understood how phylogenetic trees are constructed. During this first game, one volunteer student had to decide where to put a mammal, a bird and a jellyfish in a phylogenetic tree.
- In the next minutes, we played the second game, which was a bit of a trick. Students had to reconstruct the phylogenetic tree of four protists. Have a look at the “Juego 2: protists” to see it. This game was tricky because there it is no way to come with the correct solution. In fact, after letting the students play for a while, we showed them that the only way to know the real phylogenetic tree was to use the DNA sequences. Then we had a few more slides explaining how mutations in DNA sequences can be used to reconstruct the history of changes in evolution.
To make things a bit more entertaining, we also connected a Wii remote to the computer, so the student who played the game had to use it as a mouse. This was fun to set up, and I think I will use a Wii remote in my next talk :-).
The activity was a bit condensed in 15 minutes, but I think that more or less all the students understood the basic concept. At least, some made questions, and in general, they seemed to like the game. I hope they will at least remember that DNA can be used to study how species have evolved :-).
If you want to customize the page, the code is available on bitbucket:
This was the first time I programmed something in Javascript, so the code is a terrible mess. There is a lot of code duplication, and a lot of patchy fixes. But as Agile Programmers say, “Code first and Refactore later”. I think I will work on cleaning this code for next year, so if you have any suggestions on how to make it better, please join the repository on bitbucket.