Replicards: Teaching and simulating evolution with a card-based experiment

Elia Mascolo, Yseult Héjja-Brichard

The teaching of biological evolution in high schools is often reduced to an account of the
history of evolutionary thought. As a result, students assimilate evolutionism more as a
philosophical current of thought led by distinguished thinkers than as a fruitful area of
scientific research. Often, mere verbal exposition is not enough for students to truly
understand evolutionary phenomena, such as natural selection and genetic drift, and their
statistical origins. Therefore, we have developed an interactive lesson in which students
simulate evolution through a card game, the replicards, and are introduced to a computer
simulation of evolution. The results are analyzed in the classroom, and students are
asked to try to explain them. We tested this approach independently with two classes at
the Salesian Institute S. Ambrogio in Milan, Italy. With our help, the students reasoned
and rediscovered the mechanisms of evolution, and only then did we introduce the
scientific terminology used to describe them, such as mutations, selection, and genetic
drift. We propose using replicards to make the teaching of evolution more focused on
understanding phenomena rather than merely memorizing authoritative opinions.