MEEA Originals: Earth Quest
A game of environmental knowledge covering ten topics over four grade bands: K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12. The game board and game cards can be printed out. Just add dice and game tokens and you are ready to go.
After generating the 1200+ questions for identifying the scope and depth of environmental knowledge that students should know at the end of each major period of schooling, it seemed like a lot of work for just using for tests. So we decided to create an environmental trivia game.
Cheryl Hardy (Columbia College, Columbia Missouri) designed a game board and a set of rules for playing and Jan Weaver (MEEA) edited and formatted the questions to fit on game cards. The Boone’s Lick Master Naturalists beta-tested the game at one of their monthly meetings and prompted changes to make the game easier and faster to play. The game was tested again at Columbia’s Earth Day Festival and drew lots of interest and players to the booth.
The work was supported by an EPA Environmental Education Grant. However, MEEA, and Jan Weaver specifically, assumes all responsibilty for any errors in the questions, whether factual, grammatical or spelling.
How to Use the Game
Any way you like! But please provide attribution and/or a link where appropriate so other folks can have a chance to use the game themselves.
Suggestions
- let students study the game cards before playing so they can enjoy the game more
- let students make up their own games and rules for using the cards – just make sure they agree on and write the rules down!
- let students create their own game cards after they have learned about a new topic
- use them to design a lesson, activity or worksheet, by taking the answers as your target for the lesson plan
- use as pre-tests to find out what your students or audience already know about a topic
- use as pre- and post-tests to assess learning after a lesson, field trip, lab or other activity
- encourage students to search for errors to help make this a better game
Errors?
We welcome feedback about the questions, their age appropriateness, correctness, even spelling and grammar! Please share any thoughts, comments, or corrections you have with us at director@meea.org.
Things to keep in mind!
- Some audiences may be too young for qualifying statements. For example, in the K-2 questions we made an effort to keep questions and answers to one syllable words and sentences to less than ten words. This means there was quite a bit of generalizing. If you can improve accuracy without sacrificing brevity, suggestions are welcome!
- The issues the questions are based on are a moving target. New knowledge from research or changing environmental conditions may make some questions out of date. We will try to review the questions every year or so, but updates are welcome!