The Life on Earth Project and our Build-a-Tree game were featured on ACM TechNews: Teaching Tree-Thinking Through Touch.

Computer scientists, cognitive psychologists, and biologists at Harvard, Northwestern, Wellesley, and Tufts universities have developed two games, Phylo-Genie and Build-a-Tree, with the goal of teaching evolutionary concepts. The games are educational and aim to make the process of learning difficult material engaging and collaborative. The games take advantage of a multi-touchscreen tabletop, which enables several people to use it simultaneously, either working on independent projects or collaborating on a single project. Phylo-Genie attempts to address the misconceptions that students hold even at the college level. The game walks students through a scenario in which they have been bitten by a rare snake and must identify its closest relatives in order to find the correct anti-venom. Build-a-Tree was designed with an informal museum environment in mind. The game asks users to construct phylogenetic trees by dragging items toward one another in the correct order. Harvard’s Chia Shen says the goal is to encourage “active prolonged engagement” rather than “planned discovery.” “This is our experiment: Can we build something that is not as phenomenon-driven but can still engage them?” Shen says. “I think we’ve succeeded in that.”