SciLit Week: Find out More about Biodiversity at BCIT

Students in BCIT's Ecological Restoration Program undertake applied projects many involving biodiversity in BC.

The projects are available to browse through Circuit - BCIT's Institutional Repository.

BCIT is home to the Centre for Ecocities  - biodiversity is a key part of their work, with Healthy Biodiversity one of the 18 Ecocity standards.

About Plant Press

Julia Alards-Tomalin works as an instructor in the Renewable Resources department  at BCIT and teaches into both the Forest and Natural Areas Management diploma and the Fish, Wildlife and Recreation diploma programs. She is a double grad from BCIT with both a diploma in Forestry and a degree in Ecological Restoration. Her passion for teaching led her to complete the Provincial Instructors Diploma program and she is currently enrolled in a Masters of Education degree program at Simon Fraser University. 

One of the things she enjoys the most about teaching  is coming up with creative and fun ways to interact and engage with the students. She was inspired at a BCIT professional development day, where she attend a session on making card games for learning by Alan Stewart. When she saw that BCIT had funding for creating various learning resources through the Open Education Resources Grant, she applied and was approved to create her own card game. Over several months she researched and brainstormed with colleague Stacey Auld on how to make an ecology themed card game. Julia decided to focus on Plant Identification as it is an area she is very interested in and passionate about. She was inspired by a series of whiteboard drawings created as a review tool for a final exam by FWR student Noah Haave in the Plant Identification course. These drawings helped form the basis of the ideas for the art for the cards, which she hand drew and painted, where each plant is drawn as a pun version of its name. 

After the drawings were created, she approached MediaWorks for help in the creating of the formatting and style for the final version of the cards. She partnered with Amy Miedzwiecki who created the backgrounds, style and layouts to ensure that the cards could be printed on standard sized paper and used by people everywhere. Amy was inspired further to take this card game and modify it to an online version, so that people could play it without having to access a printer or having to touch/share the cards. Stacey Auld, Jace Standish and the students in the Forest and Natural Areas Management and Fish, Wildlife and Recreation programs were crucial in the play testing and finalization of the rules for the game. Amy and Julia hope that both the physical and digital versions of Plant Press can help future students and others learn how to identify plants and inspire them to create their own games.

Plant Press is available through Circuit, BCIT's Institutional Repository, for anyone to access and download.