Paleonet: Outreach for public science literacy

James.Verhoff at CH2M.com James.Verhoff at CH2M.com
Thu Jun 2 20:13:26 UTC 2011


The idea of utilizing video games as educational tools has been batted around the gaming industry. As I understand it, right now the concept they're focusing on is called "tangential learning"-meaning that the material you're learning about isn't exactly central to the game itself, but is something that people look up after playing the game. Really, it's just as easy to get games which involve dinosaurs right as it is to get them wrong, and if we present the science properly it will certainly get attention. Paleontologists have the market on the "Wow!" factor more or less cornered.

On a somewhat related note, Galaxy Zoo seems like a very good model for public outreach into science. The public can look at beautiful pictures of galaxies, help in identifying them, and speak to experts (message boards and online forums have a nasty reputation, but properly moderated and with a fixed goal they can greatly facilitate feedback); in return, the astronomers involved get help identifying the terabytes of data they have to sift through. A few rather significant finds have been discovered through Galaxy Zoo, attesting to its utility. How difficult would a similar set-up be for paleontology to pull off? Obviously we'd have to break it up-perhaps the traditional vertebrate/invertebrate split, with the invertebrates suitably subdivided-but it seems that this would certainly help both the scientific community (in that we have far more material in museums than we have classified material in them), and encourage the public to take an interest in us. Galaxy Zoo starts with a basic quiz, and as I understand it has known galaxies randomly come up during the user's classification sessions as unknowns, giving them a way to check for accuracy.

James R. Verhoff

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.paleonet.org/pipermail/paleonet/attachments/20110602/ee5c72fb/attachment.htm>


More information about the Paleonet mailing list