NMC Campus Observer

Life, the Universe and Everything - towels supplied!

Corwin Carillon (aka Nick Noakes) : Aug 21, 2007 07:23am

39 Teachers Buzz participants had a great tour of a student built exhibit courtesy of our guides, instructional designer Ourania Fizgig and student Alan Myhre. They led us through The History of Earth & Life on Earth Exhibit, which was created as part of a non-major undergraduate intro-astrobiology course, Exploring Life in the Universe.

Students in the ASTR202 (spring 2007) class helped to design and build a scale model installation work on the timeline of Earth, 4.6 billion years ago to the present, for their semester long “creative project”. Embedded in this timeline are important landmark events in planet formation, geology, biology, and anthropology. Ourania took us through a quick presentation of the awesome things that happened during the project, the areas where they had challenges and where its going next!

We then walked through the tour of the major timeline areas in a free roam of the exhibit. Questions came thick and fast and we look forward to seeing this student build develop further with subsequent cohorts. Ourania hopes to see this expand with parallel timeline paths for other subjects such as chemistry, geology, astronomy, math (history of) .. in fact, the history of anything! The current exhibit includes torrential rain, meteor showers, erupting volcanoes … you name it and it gets thrown at you!

This is a fantastic and growing resource for teachers, students and administrators alike! Put it on your list of educational spaces to visit in Second Life!

It can be found at Living in the Universe (30, 190, 251). So get along there with some friends, as it’s worth sharing the experience in a group!

See the rich text chat transcript (thanks Kisa) and photos on Flickr.

Story filed under: Teacher's Buzz, Teaching and Learning
Tags: nmccampus, scienceeducation, teachersbuzz
See all stories by Corwin Carillon (aka Nick Noakes)