Science on the Cards

Fulbright offered me a scholarship right when I was staring down a career crossroads.

In 2014, I was 3 years out of university and I had just wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign for an educational board game called Go Extinct!

The game represented my love of biology, specifically evolution, as well as my pursuits in teaching and graphic design.

Indeed, the game’s strategy organically taught players how to read evolutionary trees, a difficult concept to learn from a textbook.

Making fun science games and opening a new portal into STEM for kids felt like my calling.

But, I also heard the siren song from science. Here was the crossroads: research or game design.

The Fulbright, with its research and public outreach components, allowed me to explore both at the same time and – spoiler alert – I realized it wasn’t a one or the other choice.

The first thing I did when I started my PhD in Australia? Why, made a game to acquaint myself with my new study system: the surprisingly diverse, cuddly, and unique rodents native to Australia.

The cards were inspired by those from Go Extinct! but there was more information on them so I could compare stats at a glance.

I basically built my study group like a card trading game!

Ariel's custom playing cards feature beautiful illustrations from 19th century natural history artists, John and Elizabeth Gould

Here are a few of the cards I made, they come with illustrations from John and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team who produced these gorgeous plates of Australian wildlife in the 1800s.

The number in the top left indicates how long ago the ancestor of the now native rodent arrived in Australia (5 million years ago or 2 million years ago).

The words on left hand side give the taxonomy of the rodent in categories that are easier to remember.

For example, “Sahuligan” plays on the continent name, Sahul (Australia + Papua New Guinea) and the “1st Sahuligan” group of native rodents is the first to arrive in Sahul via PNG.

This contrasts with the “Rattus’nforcements” which are all from the genus Rattus and the second wave of native rodents to arrive, several million years after the first Sahuligans.

This year, I’ve been trying to offer the experience of scientific game design to more people, especially kids.

I found two government grants, and in full Fulbright fashion, one came from Australia and one from the U.S. Then, together with science visualization company, Evidently So, we created DIY Go Extinct!, a free online platform where kids can create their own versions of the Go Extinct! around their favorite flora, fauna, and fossils.

I plan to continue mixing science and game design together because I think giving kids the challenge to create science games gives them a taste of what science research is like. Both pursuits have elements of creativity, exploration, of testing prototypes, and of sharing a tangible end product with others.

You can create your own Go Extinct! game with the free online platform DIY Go Extinct! at www.steamgalaxy.com/design-your-own-game/

Ariel Marcy | 2014 U.S. Postgraduate Scholar | Evolutionary Ecology / STEM Education | Stanford University / The University of Queensland

Ariel is an evolutionary biologist dedicated to communicating science, especially through games. Her research focuses on the evolution of skull shape variation in mammals, especially rodents across different habitats.

Her first publications on the North American Western pocket gophers (genus Thomomys) demonstrated that their unusual pattern of species distributions could be explained by differences in soil type and digging adaptations.

During her Fulbright Scholarship, Ariel worked with Dr. Vera Weisbecker of The University of Queensland. They began a study on Australian short-beaked echidnas using very similar methodology to Ariel's earlier work with pocket gophers. Echidnas and gophers are both digging mammals found across a variety of ecosystems and soil types. Echidnas, unlike gophers, lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young.

Their research is laying the groundwork for understanding how two digging mammals with radically divergent development strategies evolve differently to similar selection pressures. This work, and Ariel’s PhD research on Australian rodents, is contributing to the growing field of Evolutionary Development (Evo-Devo). Evo-Devo looks at the developmental process to understand what variations are possible for certain animals to evolve. This organism-centric approach complements the more traditional approach to evolution research which focuses on how the environment selects for certain variations.