Abstract
Surviving Extinction is an interactive, adaptive, digital learning experience through which students learn about the history of vertebrate evolution over the last 350 million years. This experience is self-contained, providing students with immediate feedback. It is designed to be used in a wide range of educational settings from junior high school (∼12 years old) to university level. Surviving Extinction’s design draws on effective aspects of existing virtual field trip-based learning experiences. Most important among these is the capacity for students to learn through self-directed virtual explorations of simulated historical ecosystems and significant modern-day geologic field sites. Surviving Extinction also makes significant innovations beyond what has previously been done in this area, including extensive use of gamified elements such as collectibles and hidden locations. Additionally, it blends scientifically accurate animations with captured media via a user interface that presents an attractive, engaging, and immersive experience. Surviving Extinction has been field-tested with students at the undergraduate, high school, and pre-high school levels to assess how well it achieves the intended learning outcomes. In all settings we found significant gains pre- to post-activity on a knowledge survey with medium to large effect sizes. This evidence of learning is further supported with data from the gamified elements such as the number of locations discovered and total points earned. Surviving Extinction is freely available for use and detailed resources for educators are provided. It is appropriate for a range of undergraduate courses that cover the history of life on Earth, including ones from a biology, ecology, or geology perspective and courses for either majors or non-majors. Additionally, at the high school level, Surviving Extinction is directly appropriate to teaching adaptation, one of the disciplinary core ideas in the Next Generation Science Standards. Beyond providing this resource to the educational community, we hope that the design ideas demonstrated in Surviving Extinction will influence future development of interactive digital learning experiences.
Highlights
Virtual field trips (VFTs), in various forms, have more than 20 years of history of use in geoscience education (e.g., Hurst, 1998)
VFTs help to address a growing problem in geoscience education, which is that while learning in the field is an essential part of education it is expensive, logistically complicated, and difficult to provide in a manner that is equitably accessible to all students (Garner and Gallo, 2005; Baker, 2006; Boyle et al, 2007; Atchison and Libarkin, 2013; Gilley et al, 2015)
Design Innovations Like other iVFTs produced by our group, Surviving Extinction is built around spherical images in which the learner is free to rotate their viewpoint in 360◦, to zoom in/out, and to click on a variety of interactive elements that vary from scene to scene or even within the same scene in response to student actions (Figure 1)
Summary
Virtual field trips (VFTs), in various forms, have more than 20 years of history of use in geoscience education (e.g., Hurst, 1998). VFTs help to address a growing problem in geoscience education (and in other field-based subjects), which is that while learning in the field is an essential part of education it is expensive, logistically complicated, and difficult to provide in a manner that is equitably accessible to all students (Garner and Gallo, 2005; Baker, 2006; Boyle et al, 2007; Atchison and Libarkin, 2013; Gilley et al, 2015). VFTs in science education are designed to bring students—virtually—to important field locations. This can be done through either web browser-based interfaces or through virtual reality (VR) systems (e.g., Mead et al, 2019; Klippel et al, 2020). Comparative research has shown both browser-based and VR-based VFTs lead to equal or better learning as in-person field trips (Ruberto, 2018; Klippel et al, 2019). The option of high-quality VFTs encourages instructors to add field learning to courses without any prior field components
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