![]() Any feedback or comments would be greatly appreciated. I’m going to set a task where they need to work in groups to play the game, learn about evolution from other resources and make a video game review on the scientific accuracy of Spore. To do this well they will need to understand evolution well and overcome the common misconceptions. What I want my students to do is to play Spore then make a game review to critique the scientific accuracy of the game. This online game is part of the Adventure, Action, Emulator, and Nintendo DS gaming categories. Looking at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, being able to critique and evaluate are near the top. Spore Creatures is a high quality game that works in all major modern web browsers. So if Spore doesn’t have good science, why do I want my students to play it? This is more like intelligent design, not evolution. For example, when you realise that there are many creatures trying to eat you in the creature stage, you’ll put more defences or stronger legs on your creature so it can defend itself better. However in Spore, the player gets to choose what characteristics their Spore creature has. In evolution, adaptations come about randomly. Evolution is about a species changing as a whole due to individuals surviving or dying based on whether they have adaptations to the environment. There are scenes where you see your creature physically transform into another species, which is not what evolution is about. For example it presents evolution as individual organisms changing. While there are some bits that are similar to evolution, Spore perpetuates some very common misconceptions about evolution. ![]() I don’t want my students to learn evolution from Spore because there’s definitely some bad science in it. There are 5 stages in the game: cell stage, creature stage, tribal stage, civilization stage and space stage. Spore allows a player to control the development of a species from a single-cell, microscopic organism through to its evolution as a social tribe, which eventually evolves to an intergalactic society. Spore is a multi-genre, single-player god game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright, the same guys who are responsible for The Sims. I’ve been exploring possible games for evolution a while now and have decided on Spore. Once again, I’d like to embed games based learning into the topic. My next topic with my year 10 science class is evolution.
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