ArtPlantae Today

Years ago when I was teaching in grad school, the SimLife game was used as an activity in the Bio 101 labs to teach non-majors about population biology. Students had control of an assortment of variables and could watch generations of their sample population change over time. Students enjoyed the exercise and it helped them understand how the traits they assigned to their sample population resulted in either their population’s survival or eventual demise.

One of the objectives of incorporating botanical drawing into studies about the environment is to use it as a way to tell Nature’s story. Botany’s story is more than complicated terminology, labels with arrows and expensive textbooks.
In today’s column, we move beyond look-see-draw and engage in a bit of storytelling.

Botanical Illustration in the Lab

How does botanical illustration fit into a lab about population biology?

How about as a game?

Educators Erik Lehnhoff, Walt Woolbaugh and Lisa Rew explain how to do this in Designing the Perfect Plant: Activities to Investigate Plant Ecology.

What Lehnhoff et al. (2008) do first is lead students in a conversation about plant ecology. They show students photographs of whole plants, leaves, seeds, growing situations and other imagery related to plant ecology (Lehnhoff et al., 2008). They then ask students to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the growth forms, growing conditions and plant traits observed in the photographs.

Student observations become the foundation of a class conversation about plant ecology. With this conversation fresh on students’ minds, Lehnhoff et al. (2008) call upon students to design a plant with traits they think will ensure their plant’s long-term survival. Instead of creating a plant using a computer program, students are asked to draw their plant and to include in their drawing every trait they assigned to their plant. The authors ask students for a detailed drawing because they have observed that the “act of drawing the plant characteristics allowed students to better comprehend each of them, and to recognize how the plant may fit into its environment.” (Lehnhoff et al., 2008).

With their plants drawn, students then engage in a competitive game of cards. The game they play enables them to live with their plants through 10 generations. The custom deck of cards they play with contains four categories of cards. These categories are Weather, Dispersal Mechanisms, Disturbance Factors and Predation/Disease. Each card drawn exposes the carefully designed plants to conditions that could impact their survival. The cards in this custom deck each have a point value. Plants with the highest points per generation survive. Plants receiving negative points in repeated generations spiral towards extinction. After living through ten generations with their plants, students are asked to write about their plant’s fate.

This clever activity provides a way to introduce botanical illustration as a tool to learn about broad ecological concepts and to move it beyond its use as a tool to learn plant morphology. Included in this paper by Lehnhoff et al. (2008) are examples of the playing cards they use in their game.

Designing the Perfect Plant is available for purchase from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) at the NSTA Science Store (99¢). You can also search for this article at your local college library.

Literature Cited
Lehnhoff, Erik and Walt Woolbaugh, Lisa Rew. 2008. Designing the perfect plant: Activities to investigate plant ecology. Science Scope. 32(3): 29-35.

Related

• How to Observe the Life Histories of Plants
• Quality Observation is the Common Denominator in Art and Science
• Center for Invasive Species Management, Montana State University