It is natural to wonder why or how. When students are ready, teachers may want to discuss  earthquakes and their causes.

The folks at IRIS have a website with a PowerPoint presentation and Quicktime movie that explain a lot of details associated with this particular earthquake and earthquakes in general. The PowerPoint has excellent pictures of the destruction to buildings, without presenting images of human suffering that would be difficult for some students. The image to the right is taken from the PowerPoint.

IRIS (AKA the Incorporated Research Institutes for Seismology) has lots of resources for learning about earthquakes including SeisMac 2.0 which allows Macintosh computers to become seismographs.

In the quest for Science Literacy, we strive to give students an understanding of natural events before they happen. Adaptive Curriculum has two strong Activity Objects, one is on determining the magnitude of an earthquake and the other is determining the location of the earthquake. The image below is from “Earthquakes: Measuring Magnitude.“

Thinking and TEKS Science Content Via Online Activities.”

I am placing the PowerPoint file here for participants and anyone else interested in this topic. Below are some titles and resources from the presentation. 

Click here to access the PowerPoint. tx-critical-thinking2

The text for the slides is presented below. 

What is Critical Thinking?

Some Elements of Critical Thinking

Design a Satellite

ž  describe types of equipment and transportation needed for space travel. (TEKS: 6.13)

ž  http://www.eduweb.com/portfolio/designsatellite/

The World of Goo

ž  demonstrate basic relationships between force and motion using simple machines including pulleys and levers (TEKS: 7.6)

ž  http://2dboy.com/games.php

Creature Creator

ž  prelude to Spore

ž  Free trial edition

ž  How can students making creatures

—  Develop science content?

—  Develop critical thinking?

—  Or both?

Adaptive Curriculum Activity Objects

ž Dancing with the Bees

—  TEKS 6.12: responses to external stimuli

ž Determining Planet Layers from Seismic Waves

—  TEKS 6.6 identify forces that shape features of the Earth; 7.2: organize, analyze, make inferences, and predict trends from direct and indirect evidence

ž Groundwater

—  TEKS 6.1: make wise choices in the use and conservation of resources;  6.14 groundwater

Using gooey balls, in the “World of Goo,” to make towers and bridges is an engaging way to build conceptual ideas in physics, engineering, and chemistry. The game made by a team of two guys (Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel) at “2D Boy” won the Innovation Award and Technical Excellence Award at the Independent Games Festival. Goo is available for PCs, Macs, and the Wii. IGN named Goo the best Wii game of the year.  In my house, the free trial download version of Goo won the “Win Over the Skeptical 11 Year-Old Award” for totally engaging my son—who proclaimed, “This is addicting!” My eight-year old son called it “very fun.”

That shows the power of Goo. A game that requires no instructions, but you proceed from level-to-level building things to transport the living goo balls. There is something satisfying about building the goo structures, and something powerful about completing the puzzle at each level. Okay, the goo ball creatures and game remind me a bit of the Zoombinis, and the puzzle contexts are not the greatest, but building the structures to solve the puzzle is intriguing and satisfying. And who wants to waste time learning elaborate storylines when there are goo structures to build?

In my trial of the free on-line sample, I built towers and then bridges. Then my 11-year old son took over, starting anew, and quickly blazed past me to get to build balloon structures to help fight gravity. Neither of us met the minimal goo ball rescue at the “Impale Sticky” level, but fortunately we were able to skip this level when we were left a few balls short.

Building a goo structure is difficult to describe but easy to do. You pull one of the goo balls and separate it from the structure. Two or three white “lines of force” (my term not theirs) appear and when you stop pulling it, the white lines become goo links joining the ball to the previous structure. Of course there is a lot of jiggling and the pull of gravity is evident. If you pull a ball too far away from the others, the lines of force disappear and you realize you need to put it closer.

Science Education and Goo

Linking goo balls forms triangular tresses, which are important units of engineering design. Through trial-and-error learning, we experience that triangle goo formations are easy to build and stable. It is a nice contrast, because it seems in the world of play (from Lincoln Logs™ to Legos™), rectangular formations dominate. The tresses are then used to build towers, bridges, and dangling structures. There is a nice science (and international touch) in the use of metric measurements such a “you have 4.4 meters to go.”

The physics of Goo feels pretty real, and this can be a bridge to many physics concepts. As you build structures, the notions of a good foundation and center of gravity come into play. Build it one way too far, and it falls down; keep the center of gravity above the base, and the tower rises. There is also a sense of harmonics/resonance/vibration in that if your structure starts to bend and bob, you have to be careful that your additions don’t cause more of this in an undesired direction.

At some higher levels of Goo, buoyancy comes into play, along with levers and moments, as balloons lift up lever arms. When this is applied to building a bridge, the balloon placement is critical because too much lift or too little gets the balloons popped. Placing the balloon closer or further from the pivot point can decrease or increase the lift.

For chemistry, the most obvious notion is the idea of adhesion and cohesion. Goo balls being attracted to other goo balls is cohesion. When they stick to something else, like the level where you have to climb up out of a canyon and make them stick to the walls, you have adhesion.

How do you Goo?

If you are teaching an engineering class, I think you have good justification to buy a class set of the “World of Goo.” I also think this would make a great addition to the computers of an elementary school computer lab. I can imagine Mr. Cosgrove (my fifth grade teacher) saying: “After you finish your graphs, if you have time you can Goo.” But for stepping softly into the “World of Goo,” give your students an extra-credit assignment to download the free version (link) at home and complete a certain number of levels. They can use screenshots to prove (and display) their work.

Edu-Goo

Winning awards is great and selling lots of this game must be pretty exciting to the creators. But I think the next endeavor should be an Edu-Goo product line. The possibilities are endless so I will just name three: (a) Online competitions between classes, schools, or the world to see who can build the Goo bridge to support the most weight, (b) three-dimensional Goo structures so students can explore using triangular versus rectangular tresses, (c) DNA Goo, where students can construct DNA double helix molecules. Less exciting but useful are worksheets that can guide exploration and discovery. Edu-Goo could have a teacher contribution page so teachers can contribute ideas about educational uses of Goo. 

Living just north of Phoenix, we get the warm sunny 70° January weather, but we can drive 100 miles to the north to play in snow. Snow takes on a reverent beauty when you are just visiting it, playing in it, and having the air full of thick, downy flakes. When it makes unwanted intrusions, such as when I lived in New York, Ohio, and Iceland, it becomes more difficult to appreciate.

To the right you will see some snow fun pictures from our snow play in Flagstaff yesterday. It is interesting to see the evolution of “sledding”. Even in my childhood, toboggans were on their way out. Wooden sleds with two rails and a steering bar, like the Flexible Flyer, ruled the hills. I didn’t even see one of these on the hills.  The disc or flying saucer seems to be waning.  The flexible-foam, body length “sled” is the new king of the slopes. But what slides down the snow best?

The “coefficient of friction” (COF) is used to express the amount of friction between surfaces and this is proportional to the force pushing the surfaces together, or the weight of the rider and sled on the snow. The greater the COF the more friction there is. The COF for not-yet moving surfaces (static friction) is greater than sliding surfaces (kinetic friction). Engineers have measured different COFs (link). For instance, the kinetic COF for leather on oak is 0.52 and for those interested in glass-on-glass action, the kinetic COF is 0.4. Google has enlightened me. I had no idea there was so much research done on snow, and that there is a vibrant field called “snow engineering”, which might be called the ultimate snow job.  Without going too deep into it, the COF for a moving skier (ski on snow) was analyzed to be between 0.01 and 0.3. I’d have to think that metal on snow would be a lower COF than foam on snow. It is good to think about, and students could do some fun experiments to find out.

Virtual science experiences must engage students and must have rich interactions. If it is just a Flash animation, I am not ready to call it an “experience” when the term video is much more suitable. If a teacher is going to bring laptop carts into a room or sign up weeks ahead for the computer lab, they should have computer-learning experiences that feature an engagement, a significant interaction, a closure, and multiple means of assessment. 

“Sliding on Different Surfaces,” an Activity Object by Adaptive Curriculum, features these aforementioned characteristics. For an engagement, students play a game where they steer a sled down a hill while encountering different types of surfaces. If they steer over the surfaces with the least amount of friction, they will go faster. They receive a score based upon how well they did.

In the student interaction, students are in an office. They slide a pencil case across a desk and then mark the distance. Their mission is to find different things in the room such as a towel, newspaper, and sandpaper (obviously a rough office)  and see how the pencil case sliding distance varies.  (Elearning Physics Preview)

This elearning physics experience moves forward to an explanation of friction and factors that influence friction. There is an optional paper-and-pencil activity sheet that students can complete as they do the Activity Object, with two questions to be answered when they are finished.  The activity sheets promote writing and become a permanent record of their learning for their science notebooks. If a teacher has a projector or interactive whiteboard and is doing a whole class lesson, the activity sheet is even more essential.

After the closure, students move onto the multiple-choice assessment, where they answer five questions and receive instant feedback about their learning. Teachers can log in to access student scores for the assessment. They can also see how long students took doing the Activity Object. If students are up for a bit of gaming, with their new understanding of friction, they can go back to the game and improve their time.

I did the Activity Object and played the game, and I observed that compared to my 8 and 11 year old sons, my sled in Flagstaff went much farther than their sleds. I would like to think that this was because I selected the patches of snow with the least friction and thus I picked up more speed. But these foam “sleds” are not very steerable and so, unfortunately, I have to consider the competing hypothesis that since my mass is a wee bit more than my sons (well okay, actually my weight is about 50 pounds more than both of them together), this may have had an influence. Since momentum is equal to mass x velocity, my momentum should be much greater than my sons’, and thus it would take longer to bring me to a stop. An impulse (force x time) can change the momentum of an object. Since my momentum is much bigger, and assuming that friction is about the same, I coast longer and thus farther.

But I think I will choose the happier hypothesis – that my greater knowledge of friction, rather than greater weight, made me go farther. Which just goes to show the subjective side of science after a happy family day in the snow. 

When we add technology to our repertoire of science activities, the best uses are for areas that allow students to do things that they could not do before. A simulation that allows students to explore falling objects with different forces of gravity, like Adaptive Curriculum’s “Free Fall”, extends learning beyond the walls of a classroom.

In a similar way, the best probeware allows students to discover things beyond the ordinary science classroom. So, if a school only had a budget for one probe, I recommend that it not be a thermometer, pH, or voltage probe, but rather, PASCO’s Passport motion sensor. Combined with PASCO’s EZ-Screen, this product is so much fun that instead of selling soda to get supply money, a science teacher could charge students a quarter a try. It is more fun than the token games at our local movie theater.

Motion Sensor

The name “motion sensor” is confusing. One might think it could turn lights on and off when walking into or out of a room. But these don’t; they really should be called “distance detectors”. The detector emits sound pulses that travel outward, and if something is in the path, the sound hits it and bounces back to the detector.  It tells how far away a person or object is located, based upon how long it takes the wave to travel to and from the probe. Since it is measuring distance from a fixed point (the detector) in a specific direction, it can be used to track a person or object’s displacement versus time. When the person moves in or out, their displacement from the probe is indicated in the form of a line graph. Thus a student can make a real time displacement-time graph and instantly understand a topic that many students find confusing.

EZ-Screen

The group that designed EZ-Screen should get an award. It is bright, fun, and engaging, which is not easy to say about a lot of graphing software. I recommend starting with free explorations of what happens when students move in, move out, and rest. The graphs show immediately what happens.  Charging students twenty-five cents a try is recommended.

The most fun comes when students try to match a graph (see picture). They see a gray line graph on the screen and then try to walk in such a way that the graph is replicated. They see the graph that was created (scarlet) against the match graph (gray), and get a score (100 being the highest). Bringing in the element of competition amps up the engaging value.  (Like when I connected my son’s PS3 online and then played his NCAA 08 Football; competing against a real (even though unknown) person made it so much more interesting to play as the scarlet and gray team.) The match graph and the actual graph my 8 year-old son and his friend made is in the picture to the right. How could they have possibly known the sleep over would be this much fun?

Science Class

For science instruction, I break my class into small groups with each having a computer and a detector. They start with free exploration. Then they practice doing the first match graph. After a few trials, they have a competition to see who is the best for the second match graph. I tell them not to do the third and final match. Each group sends their top contender to the front probe, which is also connected to a projector. We then have the finals, to award the title of “Grand Displacement-Time Graph Champion”. This was great fun and learning for my middle school science children this semester, and for adult preservice teachers in previous semesters. If you set up a little bookie operation you can make some more money by taking bets on the finals. I recommend taking 10% of the action.

Of course, with this probe you can do other things as well with other PASCO software, like dropping a table tennis ball and seeing a free fall graph. And then you could go to Adaptive Curriculum to explore free fall with different gravitational forces.

Conclusion

While technology might be used because it makes some things easier, I think when we are on limited budgets, starting with things that we can’t easily do, or that are impossible to do with regular tools makes the most sense. So let your students explore other planets with Adaptive Curriculum, and let them see that some graphing is great fun with EZ-Screen and motion detectors. It’s just too bad that they don’t turn off the lights.

The question is… What will you buy with all the money you make?

Adaptive Curriculum's Free Fall

For the Record

I hope you know I was kidding about the quarters and 10% of the action on the betting. I prefer Twinkies and other lunch snacks instead of quarters and I limit myself to 8% of the gambling action. 

The references to Scarlet and Gray does suggest an affinity for Buckeyes. 

Some people use the term dataloggers instead of  probeware.  If you wear smell sensors connected to clothing armpits, these are called probewear, otherwise the term probeware is preferred.  

Back on September 11, 2008, I wrote about the new Spore game and expressed concerns about the way evolution is depicted. I also restated other reviewers’ comments that it is a boring game.  After the incredible hype approaching the release, the media has been pretty silent.

PBS’ “Online NewsHour”, however, did post this article in October: “New ‘Fun Biology’ Video Game Lets Players Tinker with Evolution”. It seems like PBS put “fun” in quotes because they know it isn’t really fun. The author, Quinn Bowman, goes on to reference my blog entry:

Educational value

Educators are mixed over whether Spore belongs in the classroom.

Professor Peter Rillero of Arizona State University wrote on his blog, which focuses on using technology to teach science, that the mechanics of the creature creation in Spore did not accurately reflect how evolution works.



“The notion of evolution as making choices, as deciding to come out of the water to be a land creature and therefore deciding what appendages to gain, and the thought that the more DNA you eat the more evolved are so wrong that I wonder why Will Wright considers this to be science inspired?” Rillero wrote.

”

But then Bowman adds this quote:

“However, University of Florida associate professor of geology Joe Meert said games like Spore ‘are a natural place for students to gravitate to.’ 

’Even the things that (Spore) gets wrong, it could be a teachable moment. Here’s something the game gets wrong.  Why is it wrong?’

Dr. Meert seems like a fascinating and good guy and he is someone who wants the public to understand evolution. So with some reluctance I say his comments remind me of College of Education field offices telling interns with crummy mentor teachers, “Well at least you will learn what not to do.” Spore tried to show itself as a great science education tool. We have to recognize first and foremost, that it is not. Teachers should have great mentors, our children should have great science education resources. 

I don’t go around boring my friends and family talking about scientific inaccuracies in the media around me.  I would not expect history educators to criticize Call of Duty’s portrayal of WWII history. Unless of course, the game made claims that it was a great way to learn history, and started touting all of the historians that had been consulted in developing the game. Spore, on the other hand, deserves to be criticized.

Not only was Spore incredibly hyped, it wanted to develop the idea that it would promote an understanding of evolution. This was evident in the September 9^th TV Show: “Build a Better Being” produced and aired by the National Geographic Channel through a partnership with Spore. Getting famous evolutionary biologists to talk about their work, and then showing scenes from Spore, could have encouraged many to falsely believe that the evolutionary biologists were supporting it.

This is far from the case, and the journal Science reported complaints by scientists involved in the documentary. “I literally never heard about Spore until I saw myself on television in this infomercial about the game,” says Cliff Tabin, a geneticist at Harvard University. “It’s an outrage (as quoted by Bohannon, 2008).”

Other Voices of Concern

Fortunately, I am not the lone voice in criticizing Spore. Here are some other views that are critical of the “evolutionary science” in Spore.

T. Ryan Gregory and Niles Eldredge describe Spore in this way:

It is, in reality, a relatively standard real-time strategy game with the same basic unlocking of features, upgrading of levels, and choices about aesthetics and function as with vehicles or buildings in other similar games. The units happen to look like organisms, the features that can be added are mouths, eyes, and limbs, and the currency is called “DNA”, but really that does not make the game anything more than superficially biological.

John Bohannon wrote in “Flunking Spore”:

So over the past month, I’ve been playing Spore with a team of scientists, grading the game on each of its scientific themes. When it comes to biology, and particularly evolution, Spore failed miserably. According to the scientists, the problem isn’t just that Spore dumbs down the science or gets a few things wrong–it’s meant to be a game, after all–but rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.

Manure

How does the game’s creator Will Wright respond to the controversy? Well despite the scientific inaccuracies in Spore, he concludes:  “It’s manure to seed future scientists” (as quoted by Highfield, 2008). Some quotes are so good they don’t need further commentary.

Enjoyment

Of course there is also the issue of how enjoyable this game is. Here is a clip from the New York Times (Schiesel, December 2008):

BEST DISAPPOINTMENT: SPORE If Electronic Arts has learned anything from its experience with Spore, it ought to be that a software company should just let its games do the talking, rather than relentlessly hyping a game for years before its release only to deliver a one-note electronic toy in the end. Spore would not have fizzled so quickly if expectations had not been so ludicrously inflated to begin with. Perhaps more important, it showed that maybe even a game god like Will Wright, the game’s creator, can stand to be reminded of the basics once in a while. Spore was great at letting the player create something from nothing. But in the end it just wasn’t that interesting to play with. Making cool stuff is a great part of video games, but the play, more than in any other media, really is the thing.

Promoting Spore

Yet, many people are willing to promote Spore because it has science in it and is therefore thought to be educational. It is not difficult to find quotes like this:  “With its educational subject matter, Spore is the kind of game any parent should be pleased to find their child absorbed in” (Alderman, 2008).

Conclusions

Since all of the pre-release and release hype, not much has been written about Spore. Pretending to be good science and actually promoting accurate science are different entities, and many in the media will take superficial views. There is a good chance that the media writers also hold serious science misconceptions, so they don’t even know when something is inaccurate. Therefore, it is up to scientists and science teachers to help the public understand which products are good educational tools for promoting science education.

References

Alderman, Naomi. (September 8, 2008). Spore: the game where only the fittest survive. The Guardian, Feature Pages, p. 3.

Bohannon, John (October 24, 2008). VIDEO GAMES:
’Spore’ Documentary Spawns Protest By Scientists Who Starred in It. Vol. 322. no. 5901, p. 517
DOI: 10.1126/science.322.5901.517a

Highfield, Roger. (September 9, 2008). How evolution inspired a computer game. The Daily Telegraph, Science, p. 27.

National Public Radio. Talk of the Nation, September 12, 2008. Spore’: Does Evolution Really Happen Like That?

Schiesel, Seth. (December 21, 2008). The Zombies Look Better Every Year. The New York Times. Arts and Leisure Desk; VIDEO GAMES; Pg. 24

Snider, M. (September 9, 2008.). Social networking goes gaming. USA Today, Retrieved December 24, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.

Whether at the high school or middle school level, students studying graphs of motion are often confused. One area of confusion occurs in the difference between distance-time graphs and displacement-time graphs. Virtual activities can cause more confusion, unless the right ones are chosen.

Distance-time graphs are a part of many middle school math and science curricula. A Google search for “distance-time graphs” reveals about 10,500 websites with many Java-based and Flash-based online activities. The problem for physics learners and teachers is that in many cases, the developers call their graph a distance-time graph but in reality they are displacement-time graphs.

Here are some examples of (otherwise) good websites making this error:

Moving Man 

Football (soccer) Distance Time Graph

GCSE Bitesize 

There are a few good sites that accurately portray distance-time graphs.

“Crocodile-clips” is a simple, free site where students move a helicopter and create a real-time distance-time graph. It doesn’t matter if the helicopter is moved away from or closer to the starting point. The true distance traveled is displayed on the graph. It is simple but effective.

Commonwealth Curriculum Pack (CCP) is a more involved site. I used this with my mixed age physics class last week and it made the point and kept their interest.

This site uses the context of the 100-meter race to show different arrival speeds. Quickly, my students learned that the steeper the slope (gradient), the greater the speed of the runner. Then we viewed several nice animated sequences of interpolation, which they then interpreted.

PBS Teacher Line http://www.pbs.org/teacherline/resources/activities/race/readings/race.htm.

Students observe stick figures run 400-meter races. They can see the runners move at actual speeds or average speeds, so this serves as a good way to help students understand instantaneous speed versus average speed.

Motion graphs will probably always be confusing for some students. We can reduce confusion with distance-time and displacement-time graphs by using internet resources that accurately portray the difference.

Additional Resources

Adaptive Curriculum’s Activity Object: “Truck On: Position and Velocity-Time Graphs” 

The Physics Classroom Tutorial: Distance and Displacement

Wordle is a tool for displaying words as a graphic image that has implications for science education. The size of the words is a relative indicator of their frequency of use. At the Wordle website I entered the URL for this blog, and received a JAVA-produced image. This image is presented above.

Wordle was developed by Jonathan Feinberg who has produced other science education tools including physics applets and the Secret Lives of Numbers.

Software applications seem to be a creative playground for Feinberg in that he produces what he is interested in and let’s others play with them depending upon their interest. I think Wordle is the most promising classroom tool he has created. But of course, he leaves it to us science educators to explore how to use the tool.

I have just completed 11 days of electricity explorations with a middle school class. I put the text for all my lesson plans into Wordle’s create page and it produced an interesting word art graphic. Teachers will have to take a screen shot of the image to share it with students. (Macintosh: command-shift-4 produces cross-hairs to capture the image, which then appears on your desktop.)

It was interesting to see words such as day, one, and two appear prominently. In checking the word count (see image to left), I realized how often I used the term “one” (apparently it is found in terms such as “someone” as well as pure uses) as I had it over 40 times. These words are not related to electricity, so in MS Word, I deleted (through find and replace) these terms and redid the Wordle image. It is presented below. I will share the image with my students for their review and reaction. It does present an interesting way to view key vocabulary in science. 

I am excited by the potential of Wordle as I stand along the shore. Teachers can make their own “Word Art” or borrow creations of others. There is an ocean of potential waiting to be explored by creative science educators. 

Useful Resources for Electricity and Electricity Science Activities 

• Adaptive Curriculum’s Voltage, Current, and Resistance: Ohm’s Law
• Adaptive Curriculum’s Building Circuits: Light Bulbs in Series
• Circuit Construction Kit

To be sure the idea behind WolfQuest has merit, let children ages 10 to 15 become virtual wolves and learn about wolves and their habitat. But in production, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and privately supported free WolfQuest game is disappointing. I found it to be tedious and buggy (on my Macintosh). Just to be fair, I did induce my 11 year-old son to try out the game. By induce, I confess, that I paid him an hourly rate to try it out. He played for about three hours total. I will say that the game does have good 3-D graphics and when my 8 year-old son saw him playing the game, he was induced to be a wolf just for the fun of it–for about one hour. They seemed to spend most of their time hunting, which wasn’t all that much fun (lots of running, with some attacking). They never did get around to mating….

I do suppose that some children may become deeply immersed in this environment, creating their own online wolf packs and exploring aspects of wolf social behavior. And if a good percentage of tweenagers were motivated to do a couple of extra hours of science explorations, I suppose the NSF would be happy with the $508,253 grant they gave to the Minnesota Zoo for the project. (I don’t know the full budget but private organizations contributed quite a bit as well.)

But where is the science? You would think there would be a “for educators” or “for parents” description of the science that might be learned. I couldn’t find any descriptions like this on their web site or the downloadable manual. The developers apparently don’t think this is important, but yet the WolfQuest merchandise link was very prominent. So what did my sons learn? They saw some variation in wolf types as they created their avatar.  They also learned that wolves in Yellowstone National Park hunt elk and hares and perhaps that the life of a lone wolf is not that much fun.

It is not easy to criticize this project; it is much like in the movie Teachers (1984), where Alex says, “That’d be like $#*%ing on the Peace Corps!” It is far more PC to say, “Wow, this is nice, look at all the downloads they attracted!” or “Wouldn’t you rather have your kids play this?” I know I might come off as sounding “anti-wolf” or against conservation of natural habitats, but that is not at all my view. For instance, when I was co-author for the biology textbook, Biology: The Dynamics of Life (Glencoe/McGraw Hill), I introduced for the first time a chapter on Conservation Biology that was eventually copied by other textbook companies. I have also taught a Conservation Biology course in the National University when I was living in Costa Rica.

Besides the lack of fun, my problem with this game is with the lack of science education. Perhaps the goal isn’t science education. Oddly enough, the web page does describe one of the goals: “Gameplay will create a strong emotional connection between players and wolves, changing player’s attitudes toward wolves and habitat conservation in the real world.” First, I think this is a ridiculous statement. My children have “become” so many characters in video games, and I have not observed strong emotional connections form. Indeed if this was the case, in any Nintendo game I would insist my sons never become Wario and always become Mario! Second, I think this is a misguided goal; the idea of a good education is to develop an understanding of a situation to make informed choices. Our goal should be to help children understand species, ecology, and conservation and not to have their emotions guide their behavior.

Resources

Chandria, Pultkit (December, 2007). Wear the skins of wolves in WolfQuest

Linde, Aaron, (January 2008). Be a wolf, learn about nature in WolfQuest

WolfQuest: Amethyst Mountain Deluxe Review