VIRTUAL FIELD WORK IN INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE COURSES: APPROACHES AND POSSIBILITIES

Immersive virtual field environments (IVFEs) are increasingly used in terrestrial and planetary geologic research. Given this trend, incorporating these environments into introductory geoscience curricula is an important step to familiarize students with how contemporary geologic research is done. As these environments become more sophisticated, realistic, and economical they provide geoscience instructors with an attractive alternative to field trips where budget, time, accessibility, location, or liability limit field opportunities. IVFEs also show potential for giving on-line students exposure to fieldwork. In educational settings where field opportunities are possible and encouraged they provide a vehicle for preparing students for work in the field. If IVFEs are to become an effective component of the geoscience curriculum, however, research is needed to address a number of questions involving environment and activity design and learning outcomes. The purpose of this poster is to examine these questions by examining the following:

1. Current work in technical and educational IVFE design, use, and assessment.

2. A preliminary experiment involving a simple IVFE in which groups of students were given the task of ranking the stability of four sections of a single hillside on a college campus.

3. A proposed project involving the development of a series of IVFEs that would be used with students taking introductory geology and earth science at the undergraduate, high school, and middle school levels. The proposed IVFEs would be 3D digital models of several locations characteristic of Pacific Northwest geology.