By Eleanor Hoskins — Posted on: Mar 12, 2015
(Earlier this week, we featured creative pedagogical uses of the extremely popular game Minecraft.)
Think back to high school science classes: how did your teachers demonstrate what you were learning? Physics or Chemistry instructors can easily do hands-on experiments to help students learn concepts and use empirical thinking. However, in environmental science, the processes at work involve complicated, long-term interactions between organisms and the environment—not something that fits well in a classroom setting. Yet it’s more important than ever to build students’ interest in the natural world and how it works. How can educators include comprehensive ecological work without consuming all their class time?
Enter the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which designed ecoMUVE, a Multi-User Virtual Environment curriculum. This realistic and open-ended virtual environment has two units that introduce middle school students to the ecosystems of a pond and a forest as they change over time. Students can learn information about plant and animal species, take and record samples and measurements, examine the environment at a microscopic level, look at historical records, and interact with NPCs (Non-Player Characters) to investigate possible causes for events. The game’s interface lets learners observe and explore by playing together.
This inquiry-based platform encourages students to direct their own learning and form their own conclusions. It also develops their teamwork skills—they need to work together to collect and analyze data, like a team of scientists would. ecoMUVE really shows the potential of gaming to transform learning experiences that would be impossible in normal classrooms into something accessible and fun.
Additional Resources
- The ecoMUVE Home Page
- Harvard Magazine : Computing in the Classroom (March 2015)