Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2006
Journal or Book Title
Advances in Geosciences
Volume
8
First Page
27
Last Page
32
DOI
10.5194/adgeo-8-27-2006
Abstract
A visually realistic tornadic supercell thunderstorm has been constructed in a fully immersive virtual reality environment to allow students to better understand the complex small-scale dynamics present in such a storm through data probing. Less-immersive versions have been created that run on PCs, facilitating broader dissemination. The activity has been tested in introductory meteorology classes over the last four years. An exercise involving the virtual storm was first used by a subset of students from a large introductory meteorology course in spring 2002. Surveys were used at that time to evaluate the impact of this activity as a constructivist learning tool. More recently, data probe capabilities were added to the virtual storm activity enabling students to take measurements of temperature, wind, pressure, relative humidity, and vertical velocity at any point within the 3-D volume of the virtual world, and see the data plotted via a graphical user interface. Similar surveys applied to groups of students in 2003 and 2004 suggest that the addition of data probing improved the understanding of storm-scale features, but the improved understanding may not be statistically significant when evaluated using quizzes reflecting short-term retention. The use of the activity was revised in 2005 to first have students pose scientific questions about these storms and think about a scientific strategy to answer their questions before exploring the storm. Once again, scores on quizzes for students who used the virtual storm activity were slightly better than those of students who were exposed to only a typical lecture, but differences were not statistically significant.
Rights
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Copyright Owner
W,. A. Gallus Jr. et al
Copyright Date
2006
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Gallus, William A. Jr.; Cervato, Cinzia; Cruz-Neira, Carolina; and Faidley, Galen William, "A Virtual Tornadic Thunderstorm Enabling Students to Construct Knowledge about Storm Dynamics through Data Collection and Analysis" (2006). Geological and Atmospheric Sciences Publications. 2.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ge_at_pubs/2
Included in
Atmospheric Sciences Commons, Educational Methods Commons, Geology Commons, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons, Meteorology Commons
Comments
This article is from Advances in Geosciences 8 (2006): 27, doi:10.5194/adgeo-8-27-2006. Posted with permission.