Build a Bird is available for iOS and Droid.
Every so often I troll the Android Market for bird and birding-related apps. I’m a sucker for anything free, and I’m a sucker for anything shiny and fun that I can do waiting around for the trolley, while cramming lunch in between meetings, waiting in line at the grocery store.
Enter Build a Bird. This seems like a puzzle book you buy at an airport that you secretly relish even though it’s geared towards kids and you finished it in a blink. But it’s fun. Also it’s free.
Build
It’s simple. You build birds. Charming, whimsical cartoon versions of birds. There are only seven (albatross, barn owl, hummingbird, peregrine falcon, pigeon, sparrow, turkey vulture) so it blows by quickly. You pick the habitat, body, beak, tail, wings.
Ioana Irma is responsible for the cheerful illustrations. http://ioanacolor.com/info.shtml
As I began, I suspected that oversimplifications (pick a single habitat for a bird that lives in vastly different places from season to season?) would drive me to tire of the app well before I whizzed through these seven simple birds.
However I was not as simple as the game. To pick a beak for x bird, the user is confronted with a series of disembodied cartoon beaks in a row, which are not at all proportionate to each other. And this user got stuff wrong. Cartoon tails floating in space presented a similar unexpected challenge: me. This game somehow made it fun to ID problems with my ID process – not too shabby.
But I’m pretty sure this twist on sharpening my cartoon bird ID skills was an unintended bonus on the part of the game developer, because the game is not what this app is about.
Learn
The back half of this app is a rich multimedia area (Cornell Lab content, natch) of extra information per bird. The albatross info screen includes basic statistics, diet, how it takes flight (with video), how its wings are designed to take advantage of ‘dynamic soaring’ (another video), habitat info, a misc factoid about their sense of smell, and a video of a mated pair greeting each other.
Not your average field guide entry
It’s sort of a multimedia version of a brief field guide entry, which is very cool, but it’s missing standard issue stuff like range maps, and has a unique focus on flight. I didn’t download “Learn Avian Aerodynamics,” I downloaded “Build a Bird,” right?
Well, duh. If only I had read the credit screen, dug through three stakeholder websites and read several articles, it would have been so obvious that this incredibly content-rich bauble was not created to simply entertain me on the subway.
The game was not developed by a traditional game developer, but rather by a nonprofit called Iridescent Learning, with Philly-based app developer I-SITE, with grant support by the Office of Naval Research. Iridescent’s mission is “to use science, technology and engineering to develop persistent curiosity and to show that knowledge is empowering.”
How do they do this? They train STEM professionals to teach, and bring them to kids, particularly disadvantaged kids. The web site is a deep, knockout of a read, and I recommend taking a look.
According to a joint press release with the Navy, “Iridescent brings advanced science to underserved communities with an approach that empowers engineers and scientists to communicate their expertise and passion to children and their families through exciting scientific programs.”
Huh. Not your average free fruit-slicing, bird-slinging game, now is it?
The release sketches Iridescent’s role as “part of an overall and sustained campaign to respond to the Navy and Marine Corps’ priority need for developing future engineers and scientists, capable of delivering solutions and solving tough challenges for warfighters.”
Basically: America needs engineers, and Iridescent has a positive track record. It thusly applied for and was granted funds, which in part were used to develop this game-not-a-game, with I-SITE doing the heavy technical lifting.
Technically Philly also has a good write-up here, including a video about Iridescent.
The true purpose of the app is not to attract birders waiting for the subway, but rather to stimulate an interest in aerodynamics in the youth of America, with a focus on underprivileged youth. I just happened to trip over it in the Android Market.
Rather than bore you to death with what I think about these many threads so woven, I’ll throw some bullets out there and leave the rest to the comments.
- I’m guessing I’ll wait forever for an update with more birds to build.
- I’m guessing I’ll wait forever infinity for the ability to build a nonsense bird out of mismatched parts, fly it, and learn why that combo of elements does not work (hat tip to a non-birder friend on this one).
- Gamefication. It’s the buzz word of late 2011, dethroning that silly also-ran of early 2011: social media.
- The Navy is apparently hip to real world jive, or at least knows enough to fund they who are hip to the jive.
- Philly continues to be the home of more awesome.
- Iridescent, I’m now keeping a fascinated eye on you. What is this Robo Zoo thing going to be like, what did you learn from Learn Avian Aerodynamics, oops, I mean, Build a Bird?
- Of course the US needs to grow engineers. And the needs to provoke interest in STEM across socio-economic groups certainly exists. But dare I ask how kids from underprivileged areas, heck how middle class kids, are supposed to afford aeronautical engineering degrees?
