Spinder

In Spinder, students play the role of a breeder trying to create peacock spiders with specific traits. The peacock spiders vary in three traits: tail size, tail colour, and dancing rate. As students navigate different goals, they learn about how selection functions, how the value of a trait changes the relative effect of selection, and why populations vary in phenotypes.

The intuitive interface allows students to quickly grasp concepts and test different ideas of how selection functions.

This game is best assigned as homework a week prior to introducing the concept in class.

keywords: correlated selection, peacock spider, positive and negative correlation, fitness