BRINGING ROCKS TO THE SCREEN: A VIRTUAL FIELD TRIP FOR THE LLANO UPLIFT, CENTRAL TX

All geoscientists agree that field trips are essential to a students experience as well as way to attract students into geoscience majors. Around the US, most introductory physical geology classes offer field trips either associated with a class or lab. At University of Houston, we currently have 1400-1600 students taking physical geology each semester with most taking the course solely to fulfill a natural science requirement. They are not required to take a lab and most do not. To augment all classes, we offer optional off-campus field trips to either the Llano Uplift in central Texas (about 4 hours from campus) or Galveston (about 1 hour from campus). Typically only 10% of the students attend these daylong trips. Most of our students do not have the free time to attend due to work and family obligations. To help these students, we created a virtual field trip to be able to offer students a chance to experience some aspects of a field trip on their home computer. This trip has two components (1) short video segments explaining some outcrops and (2) GigaPan images of the outcrops that allow them to see the entire outcrop as well as zoom in on features seen by a student close to an outcrop. To get credit for “attending” the trip, students have to answer a series of questions to be sure they understood what was presented as well as interpret some simple features such as thickness and constancy of bedding, locate an unconformity, find dikes, sills, and simple structures. To make their interpretations, they use screen capture and annotate their pictures in powerpoint. Their interpretations as well as answers are sent to TAs who then evaluate them and initiate an online discussion with the students to be sure the students are making viable interpretations. Some features are easy to interpret and others that we think are simple are difficult for these students. Surprisingly, interpreting bedding and unconformity contacts are hard tasks. They can interpret cartoon sketches with complicated cross cutting features for tests but can’t identify where on an outcrop is the “Great Unconformity” between granite and Hickory Ridge sandstones. We are in the process of making further refinements of our virtual field trip so that students will be able to make these simple interpretations.