An Interactive Game Approach to Learning in Historical Geology and Paleontology

An interactive game used in conjunction with traditional laboratory work, group discussions, student presentations, and writing exercises, provides an enjoyable and motivating dimension to a university seminar/lab course in Historical Geology and Paleontology. A simple spelling-bee-type game evolves over ten weeks into a room-sized board game based on the geological time scale. The game helps students learn fossil morphology, identification, classification, and paleoecology while illustrating the occurrences of important fossil groups, sea level fluctuations, and orogenic events through time. It also serves as an effective means for evaluating student progress in the laboratory. Although the game content is designed for geology majors in a university setting, the time scale game board can easily be adapted to a secondary school environment.