Forbes profiles a hot new game about evolutionary creatures.No, not that one. What caught the eye of Forbes is a card game called Origins: An Evolutionary Journey, created by biological anthropologists Mindy Pitre of St. Lawrence University and Nicole Burt of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Pitre and Burt say the impetus for the game was “how we have seen students struggle to understand core concepts of evolution and, as a result, have poor learning outcomes.” Creating a card game is their way of “supporting students and helping them learn evolution in a fun and exciting way,” according to Forbes. So how does it work? From the story: Gameplay is relatively simple, and in some ways akin to how the board game Cranium works. Students work individually or in groups to answer questions on cards that are color-coded into different topics, including Being Human, Origins & Transitions, Primates, Evolution & Variation, Genetics and Fundamentals. An instructor can read the cards and pose the questions to students, adding up points per student or team. But there are some twists in the game, just as you’d expect from evolution. Some of the cards aren’t just standard questions; they require students to actually do something a bit different. … And for an even bigger twist, there are the Four Forces of Evolution cards — by playing “bottleneck,” “founder effect,” “extinction” or “natural selection,” students force an evolution of the rules of the game according to standard mechanisms. The game’s goal was to go beyond traditional pedagogical techniques because, as Burt tells Forbes, “student learning outcomes are increased when active learning occurs in the classroom.” Why a card game when students today are downloading apps left and right? ”We wanted students to have something they can physically hold and use in a classroom,” Burt and Pitre say. “Apps tend to leave students working on their own. With ‘Origins’, students work together, interactively, which helps them build memories of the material that will last.”
The next evolution in biological anthropology education: a card game
Cleveland is among a handful of Midwestern cities with office markets that are “still on the rise,” according to this story from REJournals.com, based on data from research firm Avison Young.The story looks at the state of the markets in Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago and Indianapolis. “In Cleveland, the suburban office market’s vacancy rate stood at a low 11.1 percent in the second quarter,” REJournals.com reports. “The entire Cleveland office market saw 810,000 square feet of net absorption during the 12-month period from mid-year of 2015 to mid-year of 2016.” In Cleveland, rents averaged $19.13 a square foot in the downtown market and $16.39 a square foot in the suburban market, the website reports. The vacancy rate in the downtown Columbus office market dropped to 7% in the second quarter, according to the Avison Young data. Office vacancy in Indianapolis fell to a 10-year low of 14.7% in the second quarter. In Chicago, the overall office vacancy rate stood at 13.3%.
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