When Biology Teacher Jon Hale tweeted at Dynamic Dunescapes, he had a vision for how useful co-creating a game could be for students studying sand dunes and succession.

There may not have been many silver linings from the global pandemic, but this is definitely one. I am truly grateful for the time and effort that Andy Nelson and Emma Brisdion invested into making Dune Battle a reality over what was a simple chat on Twitter as the nation plunged into lockdown and we started teaching from home.

Our school was delivering video lessons from the outset, but this is no replacement for fieldwork. We tried filming transects live battling the issues with wind, we tried taking photos of quadrats and analysing them at home in the reliability of broadband, but nothing comes close to actually studying ecosystems in situ.

Making the effort to try and deliver fieldwork experiences remotely did give us time to evaluate how we normally do it and the problems we face. Living in Jersey we are incredibly fortunate to have access to some amazing coastal ecosystems demonstrating textbook trends for zonation and succession, but students would struggle to obtain accurate data without considerable help from their teachers.

The issue is that each and every student is affected by Plant Blindness, or Plant Awareness Disparity as it should be known. They struggle to see the uniqueness of different plants, seeing a blanket of grass, rather than the sand sedges, marram, sea fern grass, early sand grass, I could go on. Every yellow plant becomes a dandelion and the appreciation of diversity is lost. Something had to be done.