Using video game technology to teach hungry geology students in the field

Utiliser la technologie du jeu vidéo pour enseigner aux étudiants en géologie affamés sur le terrain

If you decide to pursue a degree in geology, be prepared to spend time in nature, where you will be asked to find and analyze rocks that will help you learn how the planet works. You’ll sketch curious outcroppings, smash stone into pieces, look at crystals through a magnifying glass, and occasionally even lick rocks, all under the watchful and judged eye of your instructors.


When the pandemic kicked off in March 2020, those scintillating yet stressful field schools were no more. Geology instructors around the world weren’t quite sure what to do. Many naturally concluded that there was no way to replicate this hands-on learning experience and settled for it, but Matthew Genge, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London (ICL), had a revelation.


By chance, he had gotten into video game design a decade earlier. “It’s all about solving problems,” he says. “You get that achievement buzz when you make something work or overcome a challenge.”


One of his colleagues, ICL geoscientist Mark Sutton, had also dabbled in the same digital sandbox. So they decided to put their skills to use in pedagogy: they built video game versions of the field trips their undergrads would normally do, where they could practice the same techniques and learn more about the planet. the same way they would in the real world. .


It all started with a 3D replica of Sardinia (and Mount Etna in Sicily), where students multiplied, searching for ancient fossils, searching for volcanic rocks and exploring an abandoned silver mine. But like all good video games, things went downhill quickly. Before long, students were flying spaceships, fending off hostile fighters, and trying to find a good place to land on an asteroid (to study its chemistry).


This innovative lockdown bypass was an alternative to field geology, but also a place for students to socialize during lockdown isolation, and an escape from the usual logistical problems of fieldwork, from funding to time limitations to injuries .


Despite these challenges, geology students often report that their fieldwork is one of the highlights of their university experience. When flights were grounded and lockdowns began, it was painfully clear that students were not going to be able to get to the field. “Like everyone else, we sat in denial for a short period of time,” Genge says.


Trips abroad became virtual meetings, where students looked at digital photos while clicking on Google Street View. “It has some value, but it was so exhausting for the students,” says Genge. “It’s awful. It was like rubbing your nose in it. Nothing compares to being on the pitch, so Sutton and Genge started looking into their hobby for a way to simulate that. “I wanted that they have that experience [in the field],” says Genge.


In 2019, Sutton brought a drone to Sardinia — one of the usual places for field trips — and took a bunch of photographs of the places they visited to learn geology. A year later, Genge used those photographs, along with bespoke computer code, to create a virtual version of the study area.


In the (real) domain, the goal would be to look at a place, study it scientifically, ask a research question, and then try to answer it. The same scenario played out in the virtual world created by Genge and Sutton.


For example, an area that was once a lake 330 million years ago is now filled with plant and animal fossils. There are even old rain tracks, which have made small indentations which have been naturally preserved. Some of these prints are elongated in one direction, which can be used to estimate wind speed. A student could find these rain prints, examine them in high resolution, and then write something about how they could be used to understand what Earth’s atmosphere was like at the time.


The students were engaged and the quality of their work was similar to what the instructors had seen in previous seasons in the field. “Two of the projects were close to release,” says Genge.


Normally a human instructor would be there to help, but that wasn’t possible with these single-player game worlds. In their place was a small flying robot that followed the students, guiding them to geological curiosities. “I gave her a pretty sassy personality,” Genge says. She teased the students if they looked clueless and sometimes referred to Chris Hemsworth.


The goal was serious, but it was a gaming rig after all, and Genge and Sutton couldn’t resist some unexpected diversions. A precarious cliff edge in the real Sardinia became, in the virtual version, a place to throw the students into the sea, whereupon a shark chased them away as they swam to a nearby island.


For the next version, Genge spent three weeks in the Scottish Highlands, driving and taking numerous drone photos, which he used to recreate the landscape around the village of Kinlochleven, another pre-pandemic excursion destination. . He made waterfalls, planted 30,000 trees, and (in a perhaps unnecessary act of fidelity to reality) populated the hills with gnats. His son Harry built the buildings – refuges from midges.


At this point, there had been another development milestone: Sutton had completed a multiplayer version of the game. All students could exist as avatars in the same space, communicate with their voice, point at things, measure orientations and rock types and draw geologic bands on a map. “And that made all the difference,” says Genge. “Suddenly it became so much more real.”


As the students traveled the area, filling in their geological maps as usual, the instructors checked their progress. “I could tell it was effective, because the students behaved like students,” Genge says. Everyone had quads, “so there were a number of races going on instead of mapping.” A student texted him politely asking how to get a quad out of a tree. And after the working day was over, students used Scotland’s digital dimension to simply hang out.


In class came a unit on meteorites, a new addition to the curriculum. Genge wondered how to keep these eight lectures interesting during the pre-pandemic period: the department had only five meteorite samples between 30 students, which limited their individual exposure to practical instructions.


Fortunately, virtual field trips provided an obvious solution. “Essentially we went on this eight-week space adventure,” Genge says.


After an introductory lecture on the distinction between meteorites and ordinary rocks, the students were given quads and told to find meteorites hidden in a vast desert. Several of the fragments came from a single meteor that had exploded in the atmosphere, scattering its parts like cosmic shotgun pellets. Could students find these related debris and piece together the puzzle?


As they carried out their detective work, a planet with Saturn-like rings slowly rose above the horizon. Some of the most exploration-minded students wandered off to find an impact crater with a damaged spacecraft inside. As they were going through the wreckage, a student asked why there were gun turrets. “Well, space is a dangerous place,” Genge replied.


Inspired by a galaxy far, far away, Genge says, the spacecraft was the start of a “stupidly ambitious idea” – a fully navigable region of space for subsequent conferences. After Genge ironed out a few bugs, the students were placed in the pilot’s seat, able to fly the (now fully repaired) spacecraft to various asteroids to understand the meteorites that originated from them.


In-game infrared sensors could be used to assess the mineral compositions of asteroid samples, buggies could be used to drive and drill into objects, and on-board labs had microscopes for additional analysis. The lectures were given via virtual screens inside the spacecraft. It was a huge improvement over soulless video meetings, where students were hesitant to speak up. Inside a spaceship, however, their avatars scrambled to see the screen amid cacophonous chatter.


Most students and instructors learned to play the games quickly, but a small fraction struggled. A few continued to crash head-on into asteroids. “I had to give them homework to learn how to fly the spacecraft,” says Genge. By the time the turrets were used to fend off enemy AI-controlled fighters and even blow up an enemy base – all in the name of science, of course – most had mastered the controls.


Genge looks forward to the time when real field schools can operate safely again. But video games are now part of the permanent program. They can help lead students for future field trips by providing practice and providing field experience for students who are physically unable to make the trips, such as those who use wheelchairs. And lectures on the subject of meteorites have proven to be more effective than anything based exclusively on reality.


Genge has high hopes for the next iteration: a lecture hall with his students, each wearing a VR headset that allows everyone to individually explore the increasingly crazy 3D environments, complete with real geological education. “We’ll all be there, together,” he said, “looking like complete lunatics.”

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