Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

12.2.09 | After building a coral reef on the gaming website Whyville to teach middle school kids about fragile ecosystems, scientists at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago decided to damage the reef with overfishing, without telling the kids. Not only did the kids notice the effect on their reef, but they started a movement in Whyville.

The WhyReef project was designed to educate kids about coral reef biology and conservation while exploring the interaction between learning in real and virtual worlds. In this video, Audrey Aronowsky, scientific program manager of the Field Museum’s Biodiversity Synthesis Center, and Beth Sanzenbacher, coral reef specialist for the WhyReef project, discuss how the kids responded to the ecological damage and the civic actions they took to improve the reef’s health.

“It’s given the kids some hope that we people can do good, can change things, can take action for the better,” says Sanzenbacher.

The kids’ level of engagement surprised everyone involved. Working during their own free time after school, students wrote up reef management plans, donated clams (Whyville’s currency), drafted save-the-reef petitions, and created t-shirts to spread awareness.

“We chose Whyville specifically because it does have a history of civic action and civic engagement by its users, but we really didn’t anticipate the emotional attachment,” says Aronowsky. “We didn’t anticipate the level of engagement and the civic involvement that people were going to have with the project. The millions of clams that have been donated to save the reef have been really shocking to us.”