Phyto Heroes is a game about phytoplankton. These tiny creatures are invisible to the human eye but produce half our worlds oxygen while also feeding all life in our fresh water and ocean ecosystems.
Oceanic Scales has expanded to include an educational app / game titled “Phyto Heroes” that explores phytoplankton as an interactive game system designed for 3rd through 5th grade students and beyond.
This game is supplemented with downloadable lesson plans, bringing this app system into the classroom for teachers that want to explore hands on, project-based learning or into the home for parents that want to extend their children’s education beyond school. These lesson plans are designed to work within the Core Curriculum model and National Science standards and can be easily downloaded and printed in PDF format on www.phytoheroes.com.
We have started this education platform with one of the smallest aquatic organisms / micro-algae (phytoplankton) and have plans to extend into a variety of other algae-based organisms at a variety of scales, as we add additional games and lesson plans to the system. Both Phyto Heroes and Oceanic Scales are collaborative, STEM to STEAM focused research projects between the Coaction Lab at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the Open Lab Research Group at the University of California Santa Cruz, in collaboration with Epsilon / Alliance Data.