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

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.