Survive!

For the past several weeks, I've had a student teacher.  We started up our state test review, and she did most of the review on Physics, Chemistry, and Earth Science.  Now that I am back in the driver's seat, we're reviewing ecology.  I've made a game for mys tudents to play to simulate an ecosystem.  Each of them is given a sheet with statistics that represent a population of an organism.

Each population has certain values for attack, defense, and reproduction.  They also have a starting population.  The rules are essentially alligned with the behaviors each type of organism is normally capable of.  Producers don't have to eat, primary consumers can eat plants, secondary consumers can eat animals, etc.

The game is turned based and has three phases per turn.  Phase 1 - Attack.  Each organism needs to eat if it wants to have the energy to reproduce.  Food is all around them and each student will make a roll against the other's defense to see if an attack was successful.  Phase 2 - Environment.  I roll for a random environmental effect that might harm the organisms.  Phase 3 - Reproduce.  If the organism ate that turn, it may reproduce.

That is mostly it.  I tell the students that the only goal is to survive.  Then I set them loose.