New Worlds for Geoscience Teaching: Using Online Games and Environments

Alan Levine

Vice President of Community & CTO for the New Media Consortium
NMC web site CogDogBlog My current interests/skills include web design, web programming, blogs, digital photography, digital video, storytelling, tagging/folksonomy, virtual worlds. BS Geology 1986 University of Delaware, MS Geology 1989 Arizona State University

Geoscience or Game Related Projects

Also while at ASU, I created some early data visualizations using some of the first color programs on the Mac (from NCSA) to generate graphs based on volcano models run on a Cray at Los Alamos.

My masters thesis at ASU, Ash Flow Zones of the Bishop Tuff: Detailed Mapping with Landsat Thematic Mapper may have been the first these mentioned in a Mary Worth cartoon ;-).

I did some very crude image processing on the false color data, correlated with spectra collected from field samples, and mapped portions of the Bishop Tuff that the satellite imagery differentiated units of various welding that could not be seen easily in air photos or in the field.

It has been used by thousands of people all around the world. With copies we gave away, there are almost 2000 Google matches on WritingHTML

For the practice examples, people gradually build up content of a simple lesson on Volancoes, and if the complete all 28 lessons they will have a complex website with images, audio, video, forms, shockwave and JavaScript. Although not updated since 2000, people still thank me for the "Volcano thing", and the lessons were eventually translated into Icelandic, Spanish, and Korean.

In 1995, I set up a faculty software review of what was then cutting edge computer games, Shall We Teach with a Game?. This included SimEarth and SimLife, and the faculty were asked to develop ideas how they might use game software. This was my first exposure to Myst, a game which set new grounds for a puzzle solving game in a visual interface, and influenced my later projects.

Negative Reinforcement University was a game created for Psychology, but it likely the most complex game I created. It features models built in Strata3D and was coded in Macromedia Director, first for CD ROM, and then converted to a Shockwave version to play via the web.

It was actually part of a larger project to explore the process of having faculty and students work as teams to create a multimedia project. The students suggested using a game interface without the clutter of menus and buttons, and we designed a place with the navigation metaphors taken directly from Myst.

During a 6 month sabbatical from Maricopa I worked 2 months in Flagstaff at Northern Arizona University creating two multi-user game-like applications using Marcomedia Director and the Shockwave multi-user server.

The Ideal Gas Law game: users tried to match a target pressure by manipulating the other variables in the Ideal gas Law to be the first team to reach the pressure. Team members could change any variable and see the direct effects.

A second program was written for Balancing Chemical equations.

The photo sharing site flickr has a very under-rated, under-used tool- the "notes" feature that allows you to annotate any part of any an image with a pop-up note, which can also link to other web pages. I create this [link http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/817669/ example of one based on the Volcano types. See an explanation of how to create one.

What do you hope to learn from the workshop experience?
I am interested in hearing the kinds of projects others are doing, or hearing of their ideas... I get a lot of projects out of listening to the needs, dreams, crazy ideas of faculty.

What specific aspects of on-line games and environments in geoscience education are you interested in discussing with other workshop participants?
Uses of web 2.0 tools; virtual worlds; potential for alternate reality games, complex/serious games, visualization.