I am constantly dismayed at how disconnected from nature so many in society are. In my line of work I am also aware of the power of gamification in behaviour change (we mainly look at using gamification to tackle inactivity and connect people to their local parks or canals). With that in mind I’ve always thought quizzes are a good way to increase people’s nature connection.
Whilst I do love all nature, fungi are my true passion. I’m absolutely no expert in them as many people here will be, but I do find them endlessly fascinating. Whenever I found a mushroom or nature quiz, I either found it too difficult for beginners (asking for latin names etc) or it used the same photos so if you played multiple times it became too easy. So I built Fungidentification, which pulls photos from iNat observations and gives multiple choice answers.
This will hopefully mean that players see fungi at numerous different angles and ages, much more realistic to walking in the real world!
Please feel free to have a go with the quiz and provide some feedback. This is essentially a first draft as I know it can be improved, so keen to hear peoples thoughts. The quiz will always be free and I never want to have adverts on the page, it is purely for fun/education and hopefully increase some beginners curiosity about the fungi world.
Note: I live in the UK and therefore the common names are British ones. Ideally I would love to create this quiz for each continent and different languages in the future, but this is a start.
This is very fun! Even though I no nothing about Fungi I could get 10/10 correct for the beginner level, maybe because I know what kind of names scientists give to stuff depending on how it looks. But when I played “Expert”, my expertise really showed! 3/10 correct, which I guess is not bad.
I especially like the UI and the UX. Maybe you could give it a favicon.
Nice job. I’d love it if we were able to pick a country for it to pull the iNat observations from. Not too familiar with fungi from outside of my country.
Yes @shreedave is correct. Originally I only wanted observations with 4 or more photos given you often need multiple photos to successfully ID, but this proved to be quite a narrow field for the API. So now it looks for minimum 2 photos and repeats in the grid if short.
Unfortunately, the correct name appears for about a second in place of the images when the page loads. Not sure if that’s due to an issue on my end, but haven’t experienced this before. But cool idea and looks great otherwise!
I like this idea, but especially given the active topic about fungi misidentifications, I want to ask: Are you pulling only from Research Grade observations? Even there I’m sure there are some misIDs, but Needs ID observations are guaranteed to have a lot.
Small problem - for people with slow internet the name of the species shows where all the photos will be once they arrive. So not much of a challenge for me!
(Just noticed that has already been noted above by @astronautovic) (and then noticed that you already said you would try to deal with it) (I should read everything before posting).
Lmao, 10/10 on expert. I actually had to guess on a Russula but thankfully it was one where the scientific name was informative.
Hilariously, the first one was one of my own observations, that got a chuckle out of me. It DID pull my voucher slip image though, which anyone looking closely would be able to see the species name on - but, likely, that won’t be a problem that much.
I didn’t see a link to the observations (if I missed it, please ignore this suggestion); I did run through beginner as well and I noticed a case where there was a Pluteus sp. that had been incorrectly identified as Pleurotus - i would fix it if I could, but I’ll never be able to find that obs again.
Also, it doesn’t reset your photos when you hit play again
Thanks for the feedback, I agree this is an issue. What I found initially when searching for fungi was that the API struggled to find research grade observations quick enough but I completely agree ideally it only use research grade if possible. Will look into it again, perhaps it can cache some observations locally so it doesn’t affect speed as much.
