A March Mammal Madness bracket on a hallway wall of teacher Jeff Grant's school.
A crowd of young people cheer, groan, shout, and laugh. Excitement is in the air! No, this isn’t a sporting event or a concert, but a biology classroom in March. They are among the thousands of students around the country participating in March Mammal Madness (MMM), a fictional, but scientifically-accurate tournament that pits 65 species against each other. The event is beloved by teachers and students alike, and is marked by the saying, “If you’re learning, you’re winning!” Many students and teachers (including my current colleague and former teacher Blake Touchet) consider MMM the highlight of the school year. Students learn about organisms they have never seen before, exclaiming, “What even is this thing?” and “This looks like something out of a horror movie!” Teachers capitalize on this engagement for learning, but also for fun, often setting up elaborate school-wide competitions and prize structures.
MMM, co-sponsored this year by NCSE, is modeled after March Madness, the NCAA Division I basketball tournament. Similar to the basketball tournament, MMM involves a series of battles between two species. However, MMM is not a team sport! The battles consist of individual combatants who encounter each other in a scientifically-accurate fictional story and their battlefield is a specific habitat that is predetermined. Although war terminology such as battle and combatant are used (and some matches do contain #CARNAGE), organisms do not always die in these fictional encounters. In fact, combatants may not even physically interact with each other in the story. The individual holding the field at the end of the battle is declared the winner, and battles often end with the loser simply fleeing or hiding. The stories are written by scientists using three resources: the latest scientific literature about the organisms and their habitats, imagination, and a random number generator that is loaded with estimated probabilities of victory for each combatant.
Students play along by completing a single-elimination tournament bracket to choose a winner of each battle before the tournament begins. They follow the results by reading the stories or watching video recaps of the battle stories produced by fans. From the students’ perspective, they are just having fun and trying to win points by correctly predicting the winners. However, win or lose, they are learning a lot of biology along the way. In order to make informed predictions about the outcomes of the battles, students research the species and their habitats and think about features that would give them advantages or disadvantages. The battle stories themselves also teach lessons about organismal, evolutionary, and ecological concepts in a fun and engaging way.
NCSE Teacher Ambassador Jeff Grant teaches biology at Downers Grove North High School near Chicago. The science teachers at his school distributed over 1,000 MMM brackets to their students this year. Students fill out the brackets and turn in a copy to their teachers before the tournament begins. They follow along with battles throughout the tournament by watching the tournament's video recaps in their science classes, referring to the giant bracket on the wall in the hallway. Grant loves to hear the “science smack talk” among students and witness the emotional aha moments such as, “This is ridiculous! Humans ruin everything!” when there is human interference in a battle.
Grant increases the excitement by awarding trophies, offering prizes, and pitting classes against each other in team competitions. The class section that gets the most points earns a doughnut party, any student that beats his score wins a prize, students with the top five scores in the school win a prize pack, and the school-wide winner gets their name added to a giant trophy housed in the school trophy case. The teachers also have their own tournament, complete with a trophy and bragging rights.
Marie Wadas teaches at a much smaller school, but the excitement there for MMM runs just as high. Her tiny rural school in Arcadia, Nebraska, serves students PreK-12, and Wadas is the only secondary science teacher. She has about 50 students in grades 7-12, and describes MMM as the highlight of the year. Similar to what occurs at Downers Grove North High School, MMM also takes over the hallway as Wadas hangs student-made fact sheets for each species above the lockers. Her students each choose an organism to research, and if their choice becomes the winning species they receive the grand prize. However, Wadas also has elaborate schemes that allow students to become winners in many different ways to keep them engaged throughout the tournament, even once the organism they chose to win is knocked out.
Wadas develops deep relationships with her students because she is their science teacher every year. For example, last year every one of her high school students was also part of her Science Olympiad team. The running jokes developed because of MMM get folded into all the science fun they have. You can hear the excitement in her voice as she recounts the time the Science Olympiad team visited a restaurant while traveling for a competition and they spotted a stuffed dik-dik, a small antelope they were first introduced to through MMM. She gushes that, “The conversations don’t just last during MMM, but they continue to refer to the animals all year long.”
Wadas deeply believes that science should be fun. It is clear that she incorporates fun throughout the school year, and MMM allows her the perfect avenue for building relationships with her students while sharing the joy of science. All her classes have popcorn on Fridays during the tournament as they watch the video recaps of the battles. She says the time is well spent: “Sometimes you just have to have fun so that kids love to come to science.”
