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Message for middle and high school science teachers:

Hello!

I'm a geosciences educator and media developer at Arizona State University and I wanted to let the community know about our new online learning adventure or 'game' called Surviving Extinction. This educational game takes students on a journey through time as they choose to take on the role of different animals and visually explore the environmental and biological changes that occurred from 350 million years ago to the present.  Students step through fifteen different prehistoric time periods and discover ten modern-day expedition sites in an interactive 360° adaptive learning experience.  Students must decide which group of animals to follow as their traits change in relation to environmental pressures, ecological changes, new species interactions, and key mass extinctions. The interactive experience allows students to explore how certain evolutionary traits may have been beneficial for species survival. Throughout their journey, they hear from real scientists, solve challenges, and attempt to build a path to the modern day while avoiding deadly predators and, most of all, surviving extinction.  Recently, data from a test group showed participants who played Surviving Extinction reported a positive and very effective learning experience (each 6.3 on a seven-point scale).

Here is the game trailer:

https://player.mediaamp.io/p/U8-EDC/qQivF4esrENw/embed/select/media/pUdz_wnfA5od?form=html

Game link (use Chrome or Firefox; not optimized for mobile devices): https://vft.asu.edu/survive/

Thanks so much for your time!

W. Taylor

[email protected]

Oh wow!  What an incredible resource!! I am definitely going to be bookmarking this to explore it more in the future.  I love how engaging it is and how it involves students with the study of adaptations through a unique lens.  At the schools that I subtitute teach at, the kids absolutely love playing their learning games.  I think this would be a great tool to have students learning about science whereas many of the learning games that I see students playing are centralized around math or language arts.  I think this helps put survival into an area that kids today have a lot of experience with and therefore can understand.  I am moving back to Tanzania this summer, and I know that some of my kids at the school there who are in their upper years would love a tool like this to practice and learn more about survival, extinction, and adaptations.  I'm definitely a huge fan.  Thank you so much for sharing such an intriguing resource!  Kudos to you and your whole team!

I love how students not only make their selections of which animals / dinosaurs that they want to use as their character, recognizing the adaptations that benefited the animal while also seeing which things were a challenge that the animal had to develop was of working around.  I think that this really gets students examining all aspects of the animals that they see, and then they can apply that to their studies of the animals that they see today.  They can start to get to the heart of why certain animals have survived into the modern day while other animals have become extinct.  What a great resource!