Finding new ways to engage students while covering complex and integrated topics is a tricky feat of pedagogy. Student attention spans can be short and the connections between topics are not always apparent from simple lectures and readings. However, with some imagination and a 20-sided dice, a classroom can be transformed into a dynamic biosphere. In this talk I will present two student role playing activities that can be used across different entomology and botany courses. The first is a “Pokémon” style match up where students select a team of herbivores and “battle” a team of plants. This game is made to emphasis the ecological and evolutionary interactions between diet breadth and plant defense traits. The second game allows students to develop individual plant “characters” and then defend against waves of insects controlled by a “Hive Master”. This last game challenges students to read literature to summarize plant traits that are important in plant-insect interactions. Students often report that although it was “definitely one of the strangest things I have done in college” that they “will never forget getting consumed by a caterpillar because they forgot to think about sequestration of chemical defenses”.
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