LEARNING ABOUT THE EARTH IN AN INTERACTIVE GOOGLE MAPS / STREET VIEW / PHOTO SPHERE / GIGAPAN CHALLENGE—THE MAGICAL GEOLOGY MYSTERY TOUR!

Google Maps has great potential for aiding geoscience education. Its most important, but perhaps underutilized feature is called Street View, which presents users with ground level panoramic photography. Although designed for the human and built environments, Street View frequently includes dramatic landscapes, rocks, and surface processes. There are even sub-marine Street Views! In addition to images taken by the Google Street View car, Google Maps hosts third party Photo Spheres. There are also a great number of geologically exciting panoramas hosted at GigaPan.com.

Inspired by a Street View-based game called Geoguessr.com, which challenges participants to identify random places on the globe, we developed a new game called Magical Geology Mystery Tour (www.geode.net/mgmt). Students or guests are presented with instructor-generated sites in either Street View, Photo Sphere, or GigaPan format. Associated with each image are a set of quiz questions. Students can travel along Street View Trails to get different views of outcrops and landscapes. They then submit their quiz answers and their guesstimates of their location on Earth, which are weighted in accordance with the settings suggested by the content creators.

Instructors in accredited schools and colleges can apply for instructor-level access which allows them to create or edit their own sites, share and evaluated colleagues’ sites, and manage their classes. There are also editors aka curators who have access to all sites to ensure quality control and prevent abuse, as is always necessary with crowd-sourced data. Guerrilla testing is planned for Spring 2015 and initial results will be discussed.