Hi everyone,

it is great to see how things are progressing.  "Bin it to win it" sounds like an exciting game (with a very marketable name :-)

We have thought about a few games as well and the one that´s closest to completion is Timeline card game with biodiversity and its protection as the theme.  I suppose most of you are aware of the card game involved because in recent years it has become something of a card game phonomenon.  If not, then here is a video link which explains how it works.  But basically the game constists of a hefty stack of cards, each card with the picture and a description of an historical "event" on the front side and a date of the event on the back side.  The purpose of the game is simply to get rid of one´s cards, one at a time, by placing it in the right spot on the "timeline" that the other cards have already formed. Only then you are allowed to turn the card to verify the date and if the location is wrong then you have to draw a new card and wait for the next round. Finding the right location is simple at first but it gets more difficult as the timeline grows and gets more compact. The game is immediate, simple and a lot of fun but also very informative.

Now, this card game has already been released offically under various themes, such as "Inventions", "Popular culture" and "Exploration" etc.  But our version involves animal diversity. We first though of a timeline of extinct animals but soon found it a little too pessimistic on its own.  If we only present what is gone then there is little room for hope.  So we added "discovery" to the animal timeline. It is pretty exciting to realize that all kinds of animals are still being discovered, some large, some pretty unique.  Technically we could have two cards for some animals, one covering their dicovery and the other, regrettably, dating their extinction.  Some animals "went out" only a few decades after they were discovered (like the Dodo and Steller´s Sea Cow).  But it doesn´t have to be that way.  That´s why we´ve added one more type of cards, a "rescue" card that dates the turning point in the history of the protection of a species. Sometimes it a clear-cut when an important environmental law is passed but occasionally it is more vague, like the lowest number of buffalos in the United States before they started picking up numbers again. 

The description on the front of each card in our version of Timeline is more detailed than the official Timeline. The history behind each animal is simply too interesting (and too little known in general) to pass it by.  In some cases we may even need it explain what exactly the date refers to.  But there is one more thing that differs sharply from the official Timeline: The picture on the front and the back are different.  The one on the front side is a photo or a well known painting but on the other side we have our students´ depiction of the animal.  The results are sometimes striking and the variety of the pictures form a rather pleasing whole, I think.

Take the Tasmanian Tiger for example.  An image from the internet and the artistic rendition of one of our student´s below.

 

This was a rather realistic and accurate depiction of the original.  But compare it to the version we have of the Dodo, which is more naive.

Just wonderful :-)

Our main emphasis these days is to complete the round of animals with the students´ versions. 

hope you enjoy,

Thorsteinn

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