Abstract:

Quantitative genetics constitutes the basis of classical Animal Breeding. The concepts about variance components are of major relevance when defining the classical genetic parameters such as repeatability, heritability, and genetic correlations for the different traits that are considered to be included as selection goals in livestock breeding programs. Understanding these concepts and parameters are essential to comprehend the variety of animal breeding methodologies applied in practice to the different livestock populations, depending on the production objective, the type of traits to be improved and the reproductive and physiological characteristics of the targeted species. The complex concepts underlying the principles of the variance component decomposition and genetic parameters make that many students become discouraged by the course of Animal Breeding included in different Degrees related to Animal Science. Different authors have developed educational games or puzzles aimed at helping students to learn, understand, and reinforce basic facts and principles related with a given subject. These games allocate the learning process in a challenging and interactive environment with the aim of engaging students as active participants and to enhance their critical thinking. In addition, the game-based methodologies promote cooperative-learning, which has been proven to be beneficial to enhance the students’ learning process. Based on this, a group of students enrolled during the first semester of the academic year 2022-2023 in the “Nutrition and Animal Breeding” course of the Agricultural and Forestry Engineering Degree at the University of León were included in this pilot study to test how a card game could help to better understand the basic concepts related to quantitative genetics. For that, the members of the teaching innovation group VetGeneULE of the University of León (Spain) designed a card game where each key term or concept to be considered was related to a “Falconer family” of four cards (symbol, concept, formulae and interest in animal breeding) that the students should be able to match based on the theoretical principals learnt in the course, which are based on the classical Falconer & Mackay book of Quantitative Genetics that gives name to the proposed card game. In a first version of the game, the family cards were developed for a total of basic 12 key terms, including several variance components related terms and the most important genetic parameters. A practical session of the course, where the students were distributed in two playing groups of 4-5 players, was used to validate the use of the card game in the classroom scenario. The first tested version of the game was based on a type of rummy game aiming the matching of the “Falconer families”. During the game, and to define a group as a “Falconer family”, the student-players had to justify the combinations done and demonstrate a clear conceptual relationship between the four cards of the given family. Through a google-form based survey the students evaluated the educational card game in relation to different criteria, including learning objectives, playfulness and usefulness. Based on the results of this pilot project the VetGeneULE group will consider further development of this game and its implementation in courses with a larger number of students so a more accurate assessment of the effectiveness of the card game as a supporting learning material can be performed.

Keywords:

Gamification, quantitative genetics, concepts, engage, active learning, card game.