GSA Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington, USA - 2017

Paper No. 164-8
Presentation Time: 9:00 AM-6:30 PM

DEVELOPING AUGMENTED REALITY (AR) RESOURCES FOR GEOSCIENCE EXPLORATION, USING LOW COST RESOURCES AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE: 2Y COLLEGE LEARNING COMMUNITY


PHILLIPS, C. Dianne1, SOREY, Nathan2, BENDER, Gary1 and BARTHOLOMEW, Charles1, (1)Science and Math, NorthWest Arkansas Community College, One College Drive, Bentonville, AR 72712, (2)Geosciences, University of Arkansas, 340 N. Campus Drive, 216 Gearhart Hall, Fayetteville, AR 72703, nsorey@nwacc.edu

A geoscience learning community at Northwest Arkansas Community College has collaborated in implementing augmented reality (AR) resources to produce an affordable demo for use in college, K-12 classrooms, and community STEM outreach. Community college and student organizations collaborated to collect donated materials to construct an AR Sandbox assembly. 2Y College, project based learning courses (Intro to Physical Science and Survey of Technical Math), applied course content as they experimented with sand formulations and safety protocols to develop a sustainable “kinetic sand” sandbox environment. Adult learners including math students and pre-service teachers learned how to calibrate the software for the sand using applied math concepts.

The AR Sandbox is used at community STEM events for educational outreach in geoscience and geospatial information science and technology (GIST). This is part of an expanding effort by our learning community to promote geoscience and GIST in both formal educational settings and STEM outreach. The next phase will be including a more comprehensive AR system to include a complete geographic information system (GIS) and virtual reality (VR) on monitors and VR headsets.