Evolution & Selection games
These are two games I created for eighth-graders as part of the Darwin Day Roadshow in 2021 (which means they are zoom-compatible!). In the original lesson, I gave an introduction on evolution and selection, including natural, sexual, and artificial selection. We then played the plant game and the bird game. In total this took about 1.5 hours. If you have less time, each game can be played on its own.
Materials needed:
-enough print-outs for every student
-small tokens to use as "evolving organisms". Alternately, students can draw evolutionary paths on their papers.
-a coin
-ability to project a slideshow
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How the games work:
-Each student begins with a handful of "organisms" and a print-out showing possible evolutionary paths.
-There are 5 total rounds. During each round, the students first pick an evolutionary path for each organism, depending on what it has evolved before (the sheet is structured like an evolutionary tree).
-After decisions are made, someone flips a coin to determine what the environment will be. The slide show will reveal what each environment is, and which traits survive.
-Each game has an additional "unexpected event", which will also affect evolution.
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Concepts covered:
My main goal in making these games was to illustrate that (1) selection acts on traits that already exist, meaning organisms don't plan their evolution depending on the environment, and (2) the "fitness" of a trait always depends on its environment, and sometimes the same trait that is good in one environment will be bad in another.
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There are additional topics covered in each game:
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Bird game
-Specialist vs generalist: in the first round, students choose between a big and small beak. In the second round they can continue "specializing" on big or small seeds, or become a "generalist" with a medium beak. The success of either strategy depends on the amount and variability of food in the environment.
-Sexual vs. natural selection: students can choose to evolve adornments. The success of adorning depends on preferences of potential mates and predation levels.
-Exaptations: phrased as "evolution works with what it already has", students have the opportunity to survive a heat wave if they can use a big beak, originally evolved for eating big seeds, to get rid of excess heat (much like a toucan).
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Plant game
-Coevolution, and specialist vs. generalist: students can choose whether to evolve tightly in sync with one pollinator, or appeal to many. The success of either strategy depends on the variety (and survival!) of different pollinators.
-Artificial vs. natural selection: some plants will come under "artificial selection", at which point their environmental conditions will differ from plants still under natural selection, and different traits will be favored.
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