Learning is winning: Bringing a neglected form of primate learning, play, into the classroom with board games!
Eustace, a 3-year-old Coquerel’s sifaka lemur, was literally bouncing off the walls, or trees, to be accurate, on a clammy October 2020 morning at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, North Carolina. As his long-suffering father, Marcus Aurelius, and ever-tolerant mother, Rodelinda, tried to rest after their mid-morning snack, their rambunctious son assailed them with head bops and tugs on their tails amidst his own backflips. Young primates are playful! This is both why monkey bars are called “monkey” bars and why our own primate kids love them!
But Eustace wasn’t just driving his parents crazy and making me and my student research assistants laugh with his antics, he was learning! Primatologists and psychologists have long recognized play as an important form of learning. Physical play, as seen on the playground or Duke’s lemur forest enclosures, helps youngsters master spatial and kinesthetic abilities. Role-playing and play acting helps young primates learn intrapersonal skills and begin to master the muscle memory necessary for adult activities.
Games are a debatedly uniquely human form of play, and most of us are quite familiar with a particular type of game, board games, which can foster the development of working memory, strategy, numerosity and other quantitative and cognitive abilities, like understandings of probability and randomness.
Some of these attributes make board games particularly well suited to teaching about evolution! Understanding evolutionary biology requires a nuanced understanding of the interacting forces of historical contingency, probability, sampling effects, and non-linearity, along with evolutionary fitness (reproductive success) and natural selection.
To this end, I designed a board game to be incorporated into the course EVANTH101: Introduction to Evolutionary Anthropology. The goals of the game were threefold:
- Provide an additional mode of learning, play, using a familiar structure, the board game, that might bypass some of the rigidity and tension that often accompany traditional college classroom learning modes, which can counterproductively actually inhibit integration of concepts.
- Reinforce the game-like aspects of evolution (e.g., evolutionary “sweepstakes,” or important, rare chance events) and theoretical plurality of routes of phenotypic evolution (ie, moving away from the misconception of the “march of progress”).
- Provide fun exam review that students will want to do, given the overwhleming amount of pure information covered by this introductory STEM course and the tediousness of rote memorization.
Developing the game was what I proposed in my BACCA fellowship application, but I told myself I would create and implement the game regardless of whether or not my application was successful. Looking back, it is abundantly clear, I would have never completed or rolled out the game in my course if it had not been for BACCA. Many a good idea that has popped into a faculty member’s head has been lost to the busy schedule of demands on one’s time and cognitive resources. The game would have been no different. BACCA crucially gave me the dedicated time and space, as well as encouragement and invaluable input, I required to actualize this gleam in my eye.
The game is still a work in progress, with so many exciting possible future developments it could undergo. But it was in great shape for a test run in the discussion section of Introduction to Evolutionary Anthropology by the spring of 2024. Students played the game in the final section prior to the second exam, which covers paleontology, the human fossil record, and the evolution of human-specific traits like bipedal locomotion and copious sweating. The game offered the students a low stakes way to refresh their memory of the earliest up to the most recent content, all while providing a fun reprieve from the midterm grind. The students appeared to enjoy the game and several students asked me if they could play it outside of the course and whether they could obtain a copy to take home to play with family and friends.
I’m so very grateful to BACCA for making the game a reality. In addition to the satisfaction I felt at its successful roll-out in my course, it also provided a creative outlet for me that allowed me to use atrophied parts of my brain and boost my overall scholarly and teacherly toolkit. I also really enjoyed that BACCA brought together faculty from all over A&S. I was the only STEM faculty member and, through my interactions with my fellow fellows, I realized I rarely inteact with humanities faculty. That was also extremely refreshing and the sessions where we would share our common struggles and the various pedagogical interventions we had attempted felt very supportive, collective, and meaningful.
Eustace is now grown, having left home (his parents’ social group) to form a new group with an equally delightful young female, Magdalena. I am enamored of this pair, as Magdelena already showed so much care and attentiveness from a young age toward her younger brother, Terence, after they lost their mom, Rupillia. And I am so curious to see – if they are destined to breed – what kind of a father Eustace will be! Meanwhile, my desk at the lemur center is two doors down from Didius and Silas, two wily youngsters who are perpetually found rolling around engaged in “rough-and-tumble” play, aka play wrestling. Sometimes the adults, Rupert and Gisela, even give in and allow themselves to be pulled into the flailing pile of lemurs. I hope we can follow their example and make more time for play, not just work, to learn! BACCA certainly serves this goal!
IMAGE CREDIT: Elaine Guevara
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elaine Guevara
