Tuesday, 9 February 2016

Introduction: Educational Games.



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) 

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