Phylogenetic trees are an important part of learning and
understanding evolution. The concept
behind the phylogenetic tree is that it is a diagram which demonstrates the
relationships amongst species based on similar and differing phenotypes and genotypes. This is an important
part of understanding evolution through an organised representation of
diversity and relatedness. By
understanding if a species is more related to one species than another it is
possible to discover ancestral traits and investigate conserved sequences of
DNA. Often relatedness is not
immediately obvious, and organisms with similar outward appearance are not always
necessarily closer related than organisms exhibiting a different
phenotype. The phylogenetic tree is an
extremely useful tool, with the nodes representing traits which can determine
where similarities and diversity occurs throughout evolution and the ability to
understand tree based design is extremely important in the practices of life
sciences.
The use of games to facilitate learning, is a particularly
useful tool. They tend to engage the user with the topic and have a higher
retention of the user than that of a book or other teaching tool due to the
element that it is fun, and the user feels motivated to continue, viewing it as
leisure rather than a simple learning experience. Games which are available on PC or
tablet/phones are more useful that ever as most teens will have at least one of
these devices (quite good at using them too)
No comments:
Post a Comment