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Are you one of those who keep thinking what came first – chick or egg? If yes, then the biology board games might interest you amply.
Biology, when broken down into ‘bio’ and ‘logy’ gives us a simple definition – study of life. While Physics tells us why a certain thing is happening the way it is, Biology tells us why we are the way we are.
No matter how interesting all this may sound, the study hour does tend to become a bit monotonous with all those theories and researches to mug up and decode. So, why not add some fun to the study hour to break that monotony and find some way to apply the learning?
Perhaps, this is the reason why biology board games are mostly a trending topic in web searches. People want to know about the interesting ways of learning Biology and board games offer precisely that and a lot more.
Importance of Learning Biology
Making Biology studying interesting is understandable, but, why, in the first place, Biology learning is important? Here are some reasons that we think and are backed by the book, The Life Sciences: Recent Progress and Application to Human Affairs: The World of Biological Research Requirements for the Future, National Academic Press, too:
- It helps us decode our bodies’ morphology and give us an understanding of body types
- It allows us to know the physiological processes going inside us
- It gives us a peek into our brain and its functioning
- It tells us about our place in the ecosystem and helps us understand our relationships with other species
In essence, it contributes to human endeavors of making life happy, sustainable, and progressive and to a large extent, problem-free for one and all.
How Board Games can Make Bio learning Fun?
Board games for Biology help you take your mind away from conventional mugging up and put your scientific brain into action. The fun factor in learning comes in due to the following purposes the board games fulfill:
- Story-telling based conceptual learning
- Engages in study material which is not so overwhelming as hefty books
- Challenges the mind to solve problems built with biology concepts as a backdrop
- Prompts quicker thinking when the game is played in a time-pressed manner
- Points scoring is equivalent to learning a concept – could it get more interesting??!!
So, why waste time any further?
Let’s learn about the most compelling Biology board games that have intrigued researchers too. Listed here are the top 7 board games for biology enthusiasts.
Top 7 board games for Biology Lovers
1. Photosynthesis Board Game
Food is the start of everything that happens to us. So, why not refresh your knowledge of how plants work and provide you the yummy vegetables and fruits? This biology board game takes you to the journey of capturing sunlight from the sun and converting it into food. Playing this board game gamifies the process of learning the growth journey of plants and trees. How plants start from the seed and grow up into the trees that we see around form the various earning points of the game
It also tells about various kinds of trees and plants and how they differ in the type of produce. Also, capturing sunlight provides the energy to make food – this concept is beautifully utilized in giving bonus points to the players. Thus, the game offers an effective platform for learning about the plants and food production in leaves tangibly.
2. Wingspan Board Game
Birds are an important part of our ecosystem. You must be knowing that study of birds is called ‘ornithology’. This game has birds, their foods, wing, and their living spaces and style at the core.
You get to pick from hundreds of bird cards allowing you to enrich your knowledge about the birds’ species. Secondly, with the steps that coincide with the life processes of a bird, you internalize how a bird performs various crucial activities required for their survival.
As a part of the gameplay, you hunt, make a nest, lay eggs and earn food items that are typical favorite foods of the bird whose card you chose. All such small, trivial activities induce profound learning and help you take a closer peek into the lives of these wonderful creatures.
3. Evolution Board Game
A creation of World-renowned nature artist, Catherine Hamilton, this biology board game takes you to the journey of evolution of about 12000 species that lived or are living on the Earth. This board game teaches evolution in story-telling style and throws light on how survival strategies led to the emergence of newer species over the course of time.
Food and water have been the core of any species’ survival – this concept comes out beautifully in this board game. The players get to do activities like roam, kill, hide, climb, and etc. to keep going through the gameplay.
Cards used in this game carry important terms like scavengers, carnivorous, climbing, burrowing, and many more that help internalize the concept of the survival of the fittest. How animals adapted to changing living conditions and worked their way around the challenges become fun to learn.
4. Into the Forest, Nature’s Food Chain Game
The food chain is the cyclic representation of who eats whom. This concept forms the theme of Into the Forest, a fun-filled board game for Biology that takes you to the forest and introduces playfully to the food chain concept.
If you are the first time learner of the food chain, the game can help build and reinforce the food relationships that thrive in a forest. Where various animals appear in the food chain becomes exceptionally clear in this board game for Biology learning.
Game cards carry pictures and important facts about the animals that live in a forest and have a crucial role in managing the ecological balance in nature. The game helps players’ minds open up to Biology and makes more receptive to reading and enquiring more about the important phenomenon like the food chain, survival, competition, and others.
5. Cytosis: A Cell Biology Game
Does cell biology make your life difficult? Do you find yourself asking ‘why the hell the cell biology?’ If yes, your attitude towards learning biology is going to take a 3600 turn after playing this game. The mind-bending names and pictures of the sub-parts of a cell – the basic formative unit of a living being – pop out of books and get splashed in the form of a game board. This game invites you with its appealing appearance and takes you to the incredible journey of cell formation.
The board game has won the reputation of the most recommended biology learning tool that helps reinforce the learning of functions that every organelle (mitochondria, rough and smooth ER, nucleus, etc.) performs to keep a cell alive and growing.
6. Animal Trivia Challenge Game
Animal Trivia Challenge is the board game that can help you introduce your kids to interesting animal facts. This Biology board game is designed for young children and offers the parents or teachers a fun way of teaching about animals to the kids. With repeated sessions of playing, the teachers can help the students learn about the unique characteristics of about hundreds of animals.
Children learn to categorize animals on the basis of their physical characteristics like big, small, etc. They can also choose other criteria like eating habits, living abodes, sounds, etc. to differentiate the animals from one another. Survival tokens and animal pawns provided as rewards in the gameplay help internalize the concepts of competition and survival, and to reinforce the living rules that dominate the animal world.
7. Plague Inc. The Board Game
Virus, bacterial, fungi, and a lot many microbes of destructive nature can hold our lives ransom and can threaten our very living. The pandemics are the cruel truth that can engulf cities altogether; what could be a better way of learning about the diseases by the way of role-playing? This board game for biology does that and how!
Players are assigned the names as a virus, fungi, etc. and their tasks include infection, mutation, attack, kill, and others. All these actions and roles establish the concept of viral and other infections in the learners’ minds. they can understand about the killing capacity and also about how to combat the diseases.
The role of antibodies, vaccines, medicines also becomes easy to absorb when the players are given survival bonuses or strategy names using these terms in the game. Truly a happening game, this biology board game unearths the secrets of epidemic and pandemic and tells how our immune system guards us against several kinds of infections.
Wrapping up,
Biology board games are no less than a boon for the learning enthusiasts who have an appreciable inclination towards learning about life and its processes. Add these games into your repertoire and gift yourself a tool that can make Biology a fun thing, while taking the stress out of the learning process.
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