Session Description: The theme for this workshop is to use video games to enhance teaching practices for undergraduate students interested in ecology. In the last two years, a pandemic has devastated typical face-to-face classroom expectations. With many classes moving to online delivery or hybrid delivery, standard curriculum such as labs have had little time to adapt to this new pedagogical environment. Moreover, it has had almost zero opportunity to design labs in a way that maintains scientific rigor while also being equitable and inclusive. The workshop we propose uses the popular video game and free cell phone application Pokemon Go to teach field ecology where any student regardless of their location can participate. Here the workshop comprises of three parts, 1) study design and data collection with Pokemon Go, 2) analyzing student-collected Pokemon Go data with spreadsheets, and 3) doing advanced analysis of the entire class's Pokemon Go dataset with R. The key goal of this short course is to provide a fun and interactive way for burnt-out teachers to get students outside to collect ecological data with nothing more than a cell phone, pencil, and sheet of paper. The practical benefits of this approach are multi-faceted; the costs are minimal, data is guaranteed to be collected, and the whole lab is scaleable (can be made longer or shorter depending on the teacher’s needs). From a pedagogical perspective, this workshop will inspire undergraduate educators to build off the technology, in this case, video games, that are fun to use and accessible to a diverse student body. The intended audience is undergraduate ecology educators that need a fun and engaging framework to teach ecology labs that are inherently inclusive and easy to implement.
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