VIRTUAL GRAND CANYON FIELD TRIPS AS MOBILE GAMES FOR GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION

In geoscience, field trips are important attractors drawing students and help mitigate trends of declining interest and persistence in the discipline. However with high enrollment courses and increasing costs and liability, field trips are becoming increasingly rare at the introductory course level. We propose that the contextualized learning and engagement of field trips can be “gamified” into virtual field trips taking advantage of the built-in GPS and cellular location services in smart mobile devices. The objective of our introductory geology modules is to have students practice the principles of geologic time, geologic structures, and surface water processes using the classic setting of Grand Canyon. Geo-referenced photographs and video of exceptional geologic sites are used to represent and illustrate fundamental principles. Students navigate outdoors at their given academic institution, while virtually rafting down the Colorado River using their devices’ orienteering capabilities. They complete at least one interactive exercise per site in order to score points and progress to the next location in a scaled-down virtual Grand Canyon.

Initial pilot testing of the geologic time module had the students ranking the degree of fun and difficulty of the game as well as their familiarity with the concepts. Content familiarity was evaluated pre and post intervention and showed a modest 17% improvement in comprehension ranking. Most felt the module helped them improve their understanding of the material and found the game relatively easy and/or fun to play. Rigorous testing focused on comprehension and student motivation continues using the refined game modules in introductory geology classes at four diverse post-secondary institutions: Porterville Community College (CA), Utah State University Eastern, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Gustavus Adolphus College (MN). Our early results suggest that presenting concepts through mobile devices, a medium deeply familiar to today’s undergraduates, and taking advantage of motion and orienteering aspects is a viable method for making geoscience instruction engaging for those communities not able to take a real field trip to Grand Canyon.