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About 90 million people are gaming online in the United States, and most of them are student age. While the majority of the 2,000-plus online games are designed for entertainment, there are many that use this technology as effective supplements to traditional learning. Some include sophisticated visualizations that attempt to synthetically simulate real-world environments; but only a handful create an authentic experience by immersing the user in physical data, and these are generally limited to the use of canned data targeted for specific learning scenarios. However, 3D visualizations of real-time atmospheric data, including gridded model output, are commonplace in the meteorology community. The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) developed at Unidata is an example of a framework that uses Java and VisAD to analyze and display 3D geoscience data (www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv).
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a team of meteorologists and computer scientists at Millersville University have been working on the development of an interactive interface-a GUI plug-in-that offers an immersion-world experience within the IDV framework. The project, GEOScience Probe of Discovery (GEOpod), is an effort to provide users with the capability of navigating a virtual probe (the GEOpod) through a geophysical data volume while actuating virtual devices, all the while being guided by a tiered instructional design strategy. The goal is to create a design perspective that will appeal to "next-geners," who are adept at gaming, and motivate them to intimately explore the data volume and take away a better understanding of meteorological concepts resulting in enhanced learning and...