IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGY AND PLACE-BASED LEARNING TO PROMOTE CLIMATE CHANGE LITERACY IN THE MARSHALL ISLANDS

Virtual reality experiences can immerse students in a location and engage them with their surroundings. An advantage of experiences like these is that they provide students an opportunity to explore locally-relevant issues around the world without travelling. Immersive tours can be straightforward to create using 360-degree imagery embedded within interactive GIS platforms, such as ESRI Story Maps, that can be enriched with images, videos, and interviews. Science storytelling through multiple forms of media can help to convey personal perspectives on issues, like climate change, from multiple stakeholder viewpoints to engage audiences and encourage them to take action. Altogether, immersive experiences can interest students, promote geoscience literacy, and ultimately increase awareness of global problems.

In this work we describe a virtual reality experience created to convey the impacts of climate change on coral reefs to children in the Marshall Islands. We collected underwater 360-degree imagery over several weeks to create a coral reef time lapse at Emon Beach, Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands. Several activities and interactive websites were created to enable students to visit various parts of the atoll’s coral reef. In the resulting 360-degree image activity, students are asked to explore the reefs and make observations (e.g., of biodiversity, bleaching, algal cover) to assess reef health. Evidence identified by students in this assessment is then used to facilitate a discussion of the role of reefs in the world and the impact of climate change on reefs. This activity allows students in the Marshall Islands to learn about the ecosystem in their own backyard and gives college students in the United States the opportunity to experience a location they would likely otherwise never see.