FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Ecosystems in Play: Exploring Biodiversity Through Gaming
Vancouver, BC – Step inside the card game Phylo and learn how species are connected through the food chain and their environment. Events like habitat loss, oil spills, and climate change will be explored to see how they have damaging effects on an ecosystem, and what we can do to protect them.
Featuring works from seven artists, the exhibition continues the crowed-sourced history of Phylo and gives young visitors a chance to draw or colour their own playing cards. Think you know enough about ecosystems? Grab a friend and try your hand at Phylo by building your own web of life in the game.
Find more information on Ecosystems in Play.
The university community and the media are invited to attend the opening of Ecosystems in Play
Date: Saturday, September 17, 2016
Time: 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
Location: Beaty Biodiversity Museum, 2212 Main Mall, Vancouver
About Phylo
What do you do when kids today know more about Pokémon characters than they do about real life creatures? For UBC geneticist and science educator, David Ng, the solution was to create a crowd-sourced game that was fun and familiar. With the aim of increasing children’s ecological literacy he created Phylo – a game that lets you collect, trade, and play with cards based on real-life organisms. In the game, players build an ecosystem by matching species cards by terrain, climate, and food chain. Progress can be halted with devastating results by playing event cards like habitat loss, or climate change that remove species and alter the delicate web of life.
phylogame.org
About David Ng
David Ng is a geneticist, science educator, science literacy academic, part time writer, and faculty based at the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia.
bioteach.ubc.ca
About the Beaty Biodiversity Museum
Dubbed the “Best Collection of Weird Things in Drawers,” the Beaty Biodiversity Museum exhibits more than 2 million specimens divided among six collections: the Cowan Tetrapod Collection, The Herbarium, the Spencer Entomological Collection, the Fish Collection, the Marine Invertebrate Collection and the Fossil Collection. This natural history museum is home to Canada’s largest blue whale skeleton, which is suspended in the two-story glass atrium.
Download a PDF of this press release.
Contact:
Amy Gibson
Marketing, Communications & Events Coordinator
Beaty Biodiversity Museum
604-352-9993 | Email