Thanks for the game!
It is a very entertaining and is highly educational, probably thanks to the pictures ... And a good way to show us fascinating species (like the purple frog) that we would otherwise not bother to look up.
Except for the most abundant species available in Europe, it seems quite unlikely that people would be willing to give these species "common names" in English. This does not decrease the value of the game at all, but it is perhaps a tad misleading what the objective is: are we to guess
a) whether a particular specie is named as a "frog" or "toad" in its common name (folk taxonomy) or
b) where they belong in taxonomy (is it a Bufonidae or not)?
If we go for a), that is perhaps not as exciting to show species endemic to places without tons of native English speakers (like Thailand etc.). But this does not decrease from the value of the game at all.
I think it shows a very efficient approach to gamify and teach taxonomy to people.
Would it be of any use to show a success rate indicator perhaps or a feedback whether the guess was correct or not?
Thanks so much for the kind words and thoughtful comment.
Regarding the objective, it's targeting the most common understanding of "frog" and "toad", which for most people will be folk taxonomy, and they probably aren't aware that there's not a scientific taxonomic distinction. So from your list, I think most people will approach it as option "a". However you might be happy to know that when selecting species, there's a couple that are in there because they belong to taxa that contain both "frogs" and "toads", so "b" would be quite difficult!
In that it goes for "a", it's really intended to show that folk taxonomy, like most ways people categorise things, works until it doesn't. Really important to me to note that it's not trying to favour "scientific" taxonomy over folk, though. There's evidence that practicing folk taxonomy, by observing and categorising what you see in nature around you, helps build connectedness with nature, which has a lot of benefits, and making people aware of folk taxonomy as a thing that they contribute to is the ultimate objective.
Oh and regarding the score: I chose not to track or display a score because it didn't feel in the spirit of the game, and besides that, there's no fair way to score it. It can't be based on their common name, as shown in the game itself, for example. You could argue that the only way to win is to always press frog, since all toads are frogs by scientific taxonomy, but I don't want to say folk taxonomy is invalid. But really, I don't think the score matters to the learning objective.
Which is why the game doesn't track it, there is in fact not even two buttons.
I think I went through a few of them and it became clear I didn't know the difference at all and didn't feel I'd get an explanation of why so stopped there.
It would have been better for each result to talk about why it was classified as a toad or frog.
Taxonomically there is no rule about the differences between toad/frog. Generally “frogs” are considered to be more aquatic than toads, but I’m pretty sure the naming is not entirely consistent amongst species. Funny game, it definitely throws some hard ones at you.
That is very much the intent of the game! Frog vs toad is what's known as "folk taxonomy", taxonomy based on people's informal observations and characterisations, and not on the principles of scientific taxonomy. There's a lot of common everyday examples of folk taxonomy that people don't realise aren't "scientific", and are very confident about, and the progression of species in this game was intended to really poke at what people know makes a frog and a toad.
I suppose I had never really thought about the difference between a frog and a toad, and after playing this game, it is clear that I have absolutely no idea what it might be.
I played this for a couple of minutes, foolishly thinking I’d be quite good, before exclaiming ‘oh, what the hell is the difference!?’ and quitting it in frustration.
My own assumption is that frogs are thinner, with finer lines in the shapes of their bodies, while toads are large, wide, and beefy with short legs. So that's how I made my choices. Wrong choices.
there were more toads than that. but i noticed there were more frogs than toads. so if you just keep hitting frog, you should score over 50% (though there is no score displayed at the end), which was better than my "informed" guessing
We're obviously not training it on the correct answers, like with those grid images where we identify the motorcycle, so are you suggesting this model is in search of data around how inaccurate people are when guessing between frog and toad?
