Go Extinct! Megafauna Materials: Print at home game, teacher resources, and colouring-in sheets

Full description

Go Extinct! Megafauna is a curriculum-aligned STEM educational card game about Australia’s megafauna and the evolutionary relationships between species. The game teaches players about the gentle giants and mega-predators that roamed the continent during the Pleistocene epoch and how to read an evolutionary tree, one of the most important diagrams in all of science. Recommended for children aged eight and up, the game also teaches players scientific language, shares some fascinating facts about each animal, and provides the names of some animals in Indigenous languages. You can find a video summary of the game on YouTube, and the image assets are available CC-BY-SA on Wikimedia Commons.

The goal of Go Extinct! Megafauna is to ​​collect clades—sets of closely related animals. The sets are colour-coded and shown on the accompanying evolutionary tree board. Players collect cards to complete a clade by asking other players for the cards they need, similar to the card game Go Fish. Each complete clade earns points, and the player with the most points wins.

Go Extinct! Megafauna directly supports the Biological Sciences curricula for Year 5 and Senior Secondary. The game also exercises critical thinking and literacy skills and teaches intercultural understanding as players learn Indigenous names for the megafauna, reflecting the much longer history Indigenous people have with these unique animals.

The resources in this repository allow you to download and print the game for free, so you can play it at home or in school. A player guide, which includes all the information you need to play the game, as well as an additional educational booklet with more details about each animal, is provided.

Go Extinct! Megafauna was developed by CABAH Chief Investigator Vera Weisbecker, an evolutionary biologist at Flinders University. Vera developed this Australia-focused edition of the game with STEM education game designer Dr Ariel Marcy, who created the original Go Extinct game.

Dr Ariel Marcy, also an evolutionary biologist, founded the educational design studio STEAM Galaxy in 2014 to produce a range of products targeted at delivering STEM education in an exciting and creative way. Go Extinct! has been successful as a hard-copy board that has won multiple international awards and has been covered by Nature and Science.

Eleanor Pease (who goes by Nellie) was the artist for this game. When she’s not drawing, she’s studying palaeontology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and is currently working on a big project to figure out what Palorchestes ate.