Nature education in China is in full swing.
A few days ago, the reporter saw an interesting news on the Forbes (Fortune) website, and the author of this news was natalie parletta. She told a story of carrying out nature education on biodiversity conservation through video games, which has a good reference significance for us to carry out nature education.
The video game is called "Questagame" and co-creator is Andrew Robinson. The game combines the virtual world with the real world, whimsical, magical design, attracting people to go outside, going to nature, observing and identifying animal and plant species, and recording uploads, after strict judgment by experts, according to the value of the recorded species, players can earn different points (virtual gold coins) for purchasing equipment or increasing energy, and will eventually ascend to the throne of the king. This biodiversity conservation game is also a competitive game that can compete between different schools.
Currently, questagame has players in more than 40 countries around the world and holds competitions between middle schools and universities. The data generated by Questagame is open to the public for use in scientific research and education through the Australian Survival Atlas (ALA) and the Global Biodiversity Information Foundation (GBIF). In the past 6 months, nearly 290 million player records have been downloaded and 38 scientific citations have been attracted.
Paletta told people about the magical birth process of this game and its special role in biodiversity conservation.
One day, while Andrew Robinson and his wife Malika were driving, they overheard their son talking about video games with friends in the back seat. The children talked about monsters and shields from the magical world. Robinson and his wife are both engineers working on integrated intelligent design, and the conversations of the children suddenly open their minds.
"Can we develop a game that takes you into the real world?" Many of the creature species in reality are mysterious and far more magical than anything you'll find in a computer game. They wondered if such a game could help scientists describe species that had not been identified before extinction.
The result of this inspiration is "questagame"— a private tech startup launched in 2014 after a small crowdfunding campaign with co-founder David Haynes, which is part of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.
questagame is a free application (app). Players use the app on their mobile phone to take photos of animals and plants to upload, and earn points based on the rarity of animal and plant species, geographical locations found, seasons, etc., and receive special energy to ascend to higher levels.
The game was originally intended to get people out of the outdoors and into nature, while educating people about taxonomy. Players are awarded virtual coins for accurately identifying species, which they can use to purchase special equipment or perform quests with other players.
Robinson said the benefit of encouraging people to learn how to identify species is that it inspires them to care about biodiversity.
To conduct research to identify biodiversity, the Australian Academy of Sciences recently launched a new website called Australian Taxonomy.
Director Kevin Till said: "If people don't know what species are on Earth and where they are distributed, it will be difficult to carry out conservation work. If we just agitate dryly, it will be difficult to attract people's attention. But if we can document species and depict them in a special way, like, 'This is a beautiful yellow creature with wings and legs,' we can draw attention to these creatures. ”
An Australian organization called Australian Taxonomy wants to get citizen scientists to join taxonomic research and simplify the process from discovering species to describing it.
Till and Robinson are discussing how to combine questagame's technical expertise with the capabilities of Australian taxonomy to accelerate species identification and ensure the scientific and accurate nature of identification.
Questagame players can improve their own taxonomic skills by accessing the Biotologist Engine and help identify the species they record (shoot). Non-players also use this resource, Robinson said, like fly expert Bly and spider expert Robert White, who will meet on the site to find new species.
New species will also be sent to a panel of experts — highly ranked players — for anonymous peer review to ensure that players are not cheating and that the species naming is accurate.
A 9-year-old boy named Boyden George discovered an unknown new species in a school in western Australia last year, a black spider with 11 red dots on its back. The discovery earned him an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Student Science Prize.
As early as the game's inception, an 11-year-old child recorded a black-faced kingbird near Canberra and scored a high score of 700. The game's founders found it strange to find the bird in this place, so they consulted experts, who agreed that the bird really doesn't usually appear in that place.
Robinson said: "For us, it was a moment of inspiration. The appearance of this bird is beyond people's imagination. This kid really found something interesting and got a high reward and everyone was excited. ”
The data generated in the game is shared with the public through the Australian Survival Atlas (ALA) and the Global Biodiversity Information Foundation (GBIF) for scientific research and education. In the past 6 months, nearly 290 million player records have been downloaded and 38 scientific citations have been attracted.
Robinson aspires to be the Google of biodiversity, eventually mapping every species on Earth by attracting citizen scientists on nature and conservation.
"Biodiversity is in serious decline, with the current rate of species extinction being the highest in 65 million years," he said. "Solving this problem requires everyone's involvement and help.
"Biodiversity is about human survival, and we have to involve as many people as possible. I think there are too many people, especially young people, who feel powerless in terms of scientific participation. ”
In order to earn income, organizations pay to participate in competitions and compete to find the most species. At last year's Global University Challenge, Royal Roads University of Bhutan came out on top.
In a recent successful inter-school competition in India, players were surprised to see that players had discovered new species in densely populated urban environments that had not previously been recorded in Indian databases.
Individual players who want to join can pay a registration fee for one year. Another revenue model in development, inspired by video games, offers players an option to buy in-game strength or equipment to gain special powers.
While a large percentage of gamers get excited about playing games or helping with conservation efforts, Robinson found that some experts want their investment to pay off financially.
"The rewards are justified in assessing the value of biodiversity conservation and science."
Players can now make money for every right id. Currently, the revenue will go to questagame's conservation partners, including the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Australian Geographical Society, the Invasive Species Commission and Greenpeace, among others.
Robinson is developing a cryptocurrency prototype called a bio-coin, which will be put on the blockchain early next year, where it can be exchanged for other currencies. To activate the coin, the player needs to identify 3 species.
Popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are mined by solving mathematical problems on computers. But, Robinson says, you're not associating any social welfare with it, you're not reducing pollution, you're not fighting cancer or anything.
"Why don't you use your ecological expertise to unearth a currency while contributing to biodiversity?"
Source: China Green Times