Explain that the Food Chains Movie will help students understand the relationships between the organisms in an ecosystem. Tell students that you're going to share more information about the concepts in the game before they try a second round of game play.What strategies did they use to build their food web? Which ones were successful? Which were not? Why?
Allow students to share thoughts on the game and explain the objective in their own words. Bring the class back together and debrief.Instruct them to choose the 5 minute game length. Introduce the topic by having students explore the Food Fight game in pairs. Tell students they will be playing a game on the computer that will help deepen their understanding of food chains within an ecosystem.What happens if you remove one animal? What happens to the rest of the food chain when a new animal is added? During the activity, facilitate the class' discussion so that students are actively constructing meaning.Alternatively, you could put tape or velcro on the back of the cards and have students arrange and rearrange them on a whiteboard or wall, or use push pins on a bulletin board. Talk about the relationships between the animals within a biome, and invite students to arrange themselves in the order of a food chain. Randomly distribute one animal game card to each student in the class.After a species is added to the biome, status bars around its avatar show how it is doing. Rolling over a card or avatar reveals information about that species' predators and prey. Or, they can choose to play that turn’s “wild card,” a biome-wide event such as poachers or rain. Students can add one species to the biome per turn by clicking on the species' card. They can also choose to limit the game by length (5 or 10 minutes) or number of turns (28 or 14.) The objective is for each player to get his or her selected animal into the biome and grow its population. In Food Fight, students choose the two animal species they want to compete. In preparation for this multi-day lesson, it would also be helpful to play the game yourself and get familiar with game play. Determine whether to use one set of cards for each pair of students or for each group. These cards were designed to be very open-ended, so plan how to best use them in your instruction as introductory, reflection, and/or assessment activities throughout the course of the unit of study. Make photocopies of the animal game cards.