When Dr. Benjamin Jee, professor of psychology at Worcester State University, first announced his National Science Foundation-backed project in 2023, it was a promising blueprint: a plan to adapt familiar card games like War and Uno to help young children wrap their heads around the complex world of biological metamorphosis.
Now, several years into the four-year grant, that blueprint has blossomed into a robust, multi-site empirical study showing that play-based learning can give kids a powerful cognitive leg up—without ever feeling like a classroom lecture. Partnering with Worcester’s EcoTarium, as well as the College of the Holy Cross, the University of Rochester, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Jee’s team has spent the last few years putting their educational card games to the test with museum visitors, where the average age of their young participants hovers around six and a half years old.
In the primary study, children and their parents played a specialized, “biologized” version of the card game War using custom cards showing the life stages of metamorphosizing insects, like the monarch butterfly, lady beetle, stag beetle, and mosquito. Each of these insects hatches from an egg and exists as a larva before pupating and emerging in its adult form. On each round of play, each player flipped over a card from their stack and had to determine which showed the later stage in the life cycle. The results have been remarkably promising, Dr. Jee said.
While a control condition using an identity-matching memory game showed general improvements, children who played the relational War game demonstrated a significantly deeper grasp of biological relationships. They were better at recognizing connections between different life stages of the same insect and identifying correct life cycle progressions overall.
“The kids are capable of picking up this information,” Dr. Jee said, highlighting that many participants enjoyed the experience so much they wanted to take the cards home. “They can learn counterintuitive ways that animals develop and do so through a playful activity that they willingly do.”
As the research progressed into subsequent large-scale studies at the EcoTarium, the team encountered new insights regarding age and cognitive load. When researchers introduced a more complex deck featuring a wider array of species, they discovered that the effects of the stage-comparison game were especially pronounced among older children (around ages seven to nine).
This finding has shaped the team’s next steps: moving toward a progressive “scaffolding” approach that starts with a limited number of species and builds up complexity incrementally over time. “This could provide younger children with an initial conceptual foothold, helping them organize the life stages of new species as they are added to the game,” Dr. Jee said.
Looking ahead, Dr. Jee and his collaborators are planning to round out their data collection, publish their academic findings, and share their insights with the broader scientific and educational communities. Beyond biology, Dr. Jee sees immense potential for applying similar relational rule-based games to other STEM subjects involving structure and sequencing, such as fractions in mathematics or elements in chemistry.
In an educational toy market often saturated with products lacking empirical backing, Dr. Jee’s work stands out for its rigorous, evidence-based foundation. By blending cognitive science with informal play, the project is proving that science learning doesn’t have to feel like a chore.
“Not every lesson can be turned into a game, and that’s okay, but a lot of lessons can,” Dr. Jee said. “We’re looking for those opportunities where we can make science learning not just effective, but also enjoyable, and hopefully get kids thinking scientifically from a young age.”
