PREMISE:

In 2002, a conservational biologist Andrew Balmford, based out of the University of Cambridge, performed an unusual experiment to access children’s knowledge of nature. What was intriguing, was that under his methodology, the experiment was designed to directly compare a child’s inherent familiarity with local flora and fauna versus his/her familiarity with characters from the popular Pokemon trading card game. In effect, what Andrew was interested in was whether “a child’s innate interest in diversity was nowadays met by man-made variety.”

The results were striking and demonstrated a huge disparity between a child’s cognition of the “real” (their environment and ecology) and the “unreal” (cartoon creatures that in effect have no real bearing in the world at large). To quote:

“Our findings carry two messages for conservationists. First, young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or man-made), being able at age 8 to identify nearly 80% of a sample drawn from 150 synthetic "species." Second, it appears that conservationists are doing less well than the creators of Pokémon at inspiring interest in their subjects: During their primary school years, children apparently learn far more about Pokémon than about their native wildlife and enter secondary school being able to name less than 50% of common wildlife types. Evidence from elsewhere links loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it. People care about what they know. With the world's urban population rising by 160,000 people daily, conservationists need to reestablish children's links with nature if they are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation. Is Ecomon the way ahead?”

The second piece of this project occurred in 2007 when David Ng, a science literacy academic at the University of British Columbia queried Andrew on whether any institution had decided to move forward with Andrew’s idea. In particular, David was interested in whether the continually evolving landscape of social media networks could lend a hand in creating a viable database of biodiversity cards, that was not only grassroots in nature but also open source, so that all children (with computer access) could in principle benefit. In other words, whether a well designed website, capable of interacting with various communities (graphic design, scientific, gaming, and education) could moderate production of a wide variety of cards of high quality – in artistic, science literacy, entertaining, and educational terms.

This Flickr account will be a central hub for images as they come in. Comments are appreciated.