A Fun App for Learning to Identify Plants and Animals

Earlier this week I shared a couple of apps designed to help you get your students involved in learning about nature by going outside and documenting their observations. It's not always practical to get outside. Your geography will also limit the number of plants and animals students can see on a walking tour of your school grounds and their neighborhoods. Therefore, I want to introduce another app for learning about nature.

Classify It! is a free iPad app designed to help elementary school and middle school students learn to classify plants and animals. In the app students are given a question and shown a selection of plants and animals. Respond to the question students have to correctly identify the plants and animals that answer the question. For example, on the second level of the game students are asked to identify the animals that are mammals and they then have to select the mammals from a gallery of pictures. If students need help understanding the question or prompt on a level, they can tap the question mark icon to receive a bit of clarification.

Creature Cards provide an incentive to students to complete each level of Classify It! with 100% accuracy. When students complete a level with 100% accuracy they receive Creature Cards. Creature Cards are essentially trading cards that feature a plant or animal picture along with some information about it. Students can make as many attempts as they need in order to complete a level with 100% accuracy.

Identify Animals of the Serengeti on Snapshot Serengeti

Snapshot Serengeti is a new project from Zooniverse. The purpose of Snapshot Serengeti is to help researchers count and locate animals living in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. More than 200 remote camera traps have been placed in the park. The cameras are triggered by movement. Snapshot Serengeti hosts these pictures in the hope that people around the world will help to identify what has been captured in the images.

If you want to help identify animals on Snapshot Serengeti there is an excellent tutorial that walks you through the identification process. Even if you're not sure of the name of the animals that you're seeing you can identify them through the classification system that Snapshot Serengeti has in place. The classification system asks you to identify the type of skin, the pattern of the fur or skin of an animal, and the style of horns (if present) that an animal has. Based on those classifications Snapshot Serengeti will suggest a few animals that match what you're seeing.

Applications for Education
Having students try to identify animals on Snapshot Serengeti could be a great way for them to learn about the various animals that they see. Along the way students will also learn about the ways that these animals have adapted to their environments.

One thing to note about Snapshot Serengeti before you turn your students loose on it is that they may end up going through a lot of blank pictures that don't have any animals in them before they get to ones that do have animals in them. This is because remote cameras can sometimes be triggered by strong gusts of wind blowing something in front of them.