Discovery
DAVID NG
www.phylogame.org
Biodiversity is another word for
It only takes a single child and a trip outdoors,
to realize that it is arguably our planet’s richest
resource of intellectual query
R
ecently, a friend asked me about my
earliest childhood memories, and two
very vivid ones came to mind. First, there
is this image of a sycamore seed falling
from the sky; the aerodynamic wonder that
can helicopter down from the tall heights of
a tree. Second, and also involving the act of
looking up, I remember seeing the underbelly of a blue whale, the largest animal on
the planet, suspended in air in the London
Natural History Museum’s great Mammal
Hall. In fact, I remember thinking it was
the most massive thing possible, no doubt
reflecting my own childish perspective.
In both cases, the memory relives not
only what I saw, but also a sensation. This
being a quickening of my heart, a very corporeal buzz, and a sense of clarity in my
head that has stayed with me through-
out my life. You see, this is what discovery
feels like. And from an educator’s point of
view, this I think is biodiversity’s greatest
strength. The flora, fauna, and terrains of
our graceful planet contain a whole world
of discovery. It only takes a single child and
a trip outdoors, to realize that it is arguably
our planet’s richest resource of intellectual
query.
Except that these days, some would say
that most children’s discoveries tend to
come through the glazed glass of screens
and monitors. Powerful and wondrous
technologies to be sure, but in a way, they
are second-class to the experience of seeing the real thing in the real world. In many
respects, they offer only an interpretation
of reality, and in doing so, they often bypass
some of discovery’s most important traits.
You forget the work ethic entailed in such
endeavours, and perhaps most troubling,
it becomes far too easy to disregard the
relationship between that act of discovery
and the scientific method that attempts to
explain it.
So what can we do to address this? How
can we embed biodiversity in our children’s
lives, and harness its potential to elicit that
sensation of discovery? A good but possibly naïve answer is to just urge children
to break away from the digital images, and
to encourage them to
simply go outside
more. Or perhaps,
more interestingly,
we can try to partner
the tools of our media
rich culture with tasks
that involve the outside world. We can
have computer games
that require the act of
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leaving the computer: Television that tells
you to stop watching. Curiously, with the
current trends in mobile technology, this
type of collaboration is more than doable.
This is why my lab has started the Phylo
project (phylogame.org): an online initiative aimed at creating a card game, modeled after things like Pokemon, but making
use of the wonderful, complex and inspiring things that inform the notion of biodiversity. It has the scientific community
weighing in on the content on such cards,
as well as gamers who try and design
interesting ways to use the cards. There
is also the careful planning of how such a
resource can lead to interest in the outside world, and participation from the
teacher community to see whether these
cards have actual educational merit. Furthermore, the intent is for this to occur in
a non-commercial-open-access-opensource-because-basically-this-is-good-foryou-your-children-and-your-planet sort of
way.
All to say that if I had a single goal for the
Phylo project, it’s that when it comes time
to ask our children of their memories, they
will not speak of looking ahead at a video
monitor or television screen. Instead, they
will speak of looking down, by their foot, at
a busy insect or an intricate plant;
or they will speak of looking up, at a
whale breaching above the water,
or possibly at a sycamore seed,
as it helicopters down from high
above. j