Field Museum’s Virtual Reef a Hit
Filed at 1:21 pm on June 4, 2009 • Leave a comment
WhyReef piques teens’ interest in coral reefs and the ecosystem and helps them become scientific problem-solvers.
MacArthur grantee Brigid Barron, in a recent Informal Science interview, called for museums and schools to “broaden how they conceptualize working with children” if they hope to encourage learning outside of their own setting. “Rather than limit the learning experience to a single place or to the here and now, it can be productive to help a learner connect to other places where they can also pursue their interests.”
The WhyReef project, developed by MacArthur grantees Elizabeth Babcock, Audrey Aronowsky, Beth Sanzenbacher, Johanna Thompson, Krystal Villanosa, and Mark Westneat at Chicago’s Field Museum, is doing just that.
WhyReef is a coral reef in Whyville, a virtual world for younger children. Created and operated by Field Museum educators and scientists and Numedeon, WhyReef draws kids into a game of identifying the marine life they see swim by, and with each step in the game they dig deeper into information on reef species and the overall ecosystem of a reef.
With its launch on March 30, 2009, the reef has had more than 100,000 visits. Nearly 7,000 individuals have played the Mini-Food Web games, and within the first month, 2,000 visitors have watched a reef video. One-fourth of all visitors to the larger Whyville play on the reef at each login. Their more than 150 posting and questions to the reef’s bulletin boards reveal their developing understanding.
The benefits of extending the museum’s resources in new ways, as Barron calls for, were evident when students in the museum’s Museology program played on WhyReef before seeing the real fish in the museum’s collections. The teens said that the virtual experience made them more confident to interact with the specimens and the researchers. They also said that seeing the specimens made them eager to return to WhyReef for more information about the fish they had seen. This feedback loop of learning shows how virtual worlds can complement and reinforce on another.
The WhyReef experience has inspired the creation of the Kids Advisory Council (KAC), a focus group that will pilot additional innovative educational experiences to link WhyReef and traditional museum exhibitions and collections. The main goals of the KAC are to gauge how kids learn in digital and real world environments, to understand how kids learn from each other using digital media and spaces, and to discover if these digital and real world experiences can become applied knowledge.
The next step in WhyReef is to begin damaging the reef with overfishing or pollutants and to monitor how the kids react. When the reef is at it’s “sickest” point, the team will launch “Save the Reef” activities. Kids will be able to complete management plans to find solutions to bring the reef back to a healthy state, raise awareness by selling shirts, buttons, or hats, and making donations to help support the plans outlined in the petitions.
WhyReef is a pilot project collaboration between The Field Museum and the virtual world of http://www.whyville.net to teach students about coral reef biology, ecology, and conservation. For more on the project click here. For more on museums and digital learning, see MacArthur grantee Anne Balsamo and colleagues’ series on the Futures of Learning Blog summarizing the state of research on the topic.
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