A virtual tornadic thunderstorm enabling students to construct knowledge about storm dynamics through data collection and analysis

摘要

A visually realistic tornadic supercell thunderstorm has been constructed ina fully immersive virtual reality environment to allow students to betterunderstand the complex small-scale dynamics present in such a storm throughdata probing. Less-immersive versions have been created that run on PCs,facilitating broader dissemination. The activity has been tested inintroductory meteorology classes over the last four years. An exerciseinvolving the virtual storm was first used by a subset of students from alarge introductory meteorology course in spring 2002. Surveys were used atthat time to evaluate the impact of this activity as a constructivistlearning tool. More recently, data probe capabilities were added to thevirtual storm activity enabling students to take measurements oftemperature, wind, pressure, relative humidity, and vertical velocity at anypoint within the 3-D volume of the virtual world, and see the data plottedvia a graphical user interface. Similar surveys applied to groups ofstudents in 2003 and 2004 suggest that the addition of data probing improved theunderstanding of storm-scale features, but the improved understanding maynot be statistically significant when evaluated using quizzes reflectingshort-term retention. The use of the activity was revised in 2005 to firsthave students pose scientific questions about these storms and think about ascientific strategy to answer their questions before exploring the storm.Once again, scores on quizzes for students who used the virtual stormactivity were slightly better than those of students who were exposed toonly a typical lecture, but differences were not statistically significant.