Collaboration for gaming: Partnership between hydrologists, computer scientists, and educators to develop an educational geoscience game

The Integrated Groundwater Modeling Center is a small research center with a focus on hydrological research and a mission to develop and promote education and outreach in our community. We believe that students of all ages learn better when learning is fun, social, and hands-on. We strive to develop games that will immerse and educate users in geoscience concepts by collaborating closely with computer scientists and software engineers. For the work presented here, we have partnered with the University of Arizona and Kitware, Inc., blending technologies and expertise to develop a game to teach hydrogeology concepts.

We have developed an interactive computer simulation of a physical teaching model for students. This computer simulation has a game-like web browser-based interface but builds upon open source software components developed by Kitware (e.g. ParaView and SimPut) executing the integrated hydrology model ParFlow, using a framework built upon the widely used Python scripting language. Students run the simulation using a familiar web-app like interface with sliders and buttons yet are learning real hydrologic concepts and can compare to the physical model. Here, we will present this interactive toolkit and the physical sand tank aquifer model on which it’s based.