Oligotrophic: A marine microbiology board game-based activity for high school science classrooms

It is important that students understand the role the ocean plays in mitigating climate change, and how every person on this planet is uniquely connected to the ocean. Identifying these connections can be challenging for students in rural or underserved areas, many of whom do not live by, or interact with, the ocean. Through the use of the board game "Oligotrophic" and the accompanying lesson, the authors hope to show students their personal connection to the oceans, the carbon cycle, and climate change. Students investigate critical ecological and oceanic processes by playing the game, which simulates real-life microbial interactions that form the basis of the microbial carbon pump. Oligotrophic is an easy-to-learn, strategic tile-placement game where players compete to place biomass the fastest. In the game, players select and play hexagonal cards based on actual microorganisms to accumulate biomass, achieve bonuses, and take biomass from other microorganisms they encounter. For this activity, students form groups and play "Oligotrophic" several times in increasingly complex simulations. In each they make predictions and measure the biomass of each type of organism represented in the game. Students track the movement of biomass throughout the microbial food web and learn how marine microbes mediate the uptake of anthropogenic carbon via the Microbial Carbon Pump. After each round concludes, students take quantitative measurements of the biomass in their systems. Groups then perform experiments using "Oligotrophic," where they introduce a change, such as removing all heterotrophs from the system, and play the game again to understand the ecological impact of their introduced change. Using "Oligotrophic" as a model, students take what they learn in previous rounds, make hypotheses about the outcome of this change, then test their hypotheses and share results with their classmates. The games reinforces the "Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)" science and engineering practices (SEP) such as data gathering from a model and using it to make informed predictions about the outcomes of the changes they introduce.