Using knowledge gained from prior development of a virtual tornadic thunderstorm, a virtual volcano activity is being developed to permit students to make discoveries as a volcanologist would. Increasingly sophisticated and realistic virtual reality applications offer great potential for educational use; however, limited testing has been done to see if such realistic representations of phenomena significantly improve learning. The virtual tornadic storm serves as an excellent test bed because it demonstrates the most visually realistic virtual reality representation of any geoscience phenomenon yet developed and includes full data probing capabilities. Science writing heuristic, a novel teaching approach based around concepts of guided inquiry to the learning of science, is being used to guide activities and prompt student reasoning about data, tasks shown to considerably improve learning. The virtual volcano activity improves upon the virtual tornadic storm by allowing the user to design the initial conditions of the system (e.g., tectonic setting, magma composition), with the type of volcano and eruptive style being a function of the initial input. Testing of the impact of both activities on student learning is being conducted in a broad range of schools and settings, including a two-year college in an urban setting, a university with a large Hispanic population, a university with a dominant African-American population, and three research schools in both geologically and geographically different parts of the country so that impacts on a representative subset of the American student population are being measured. Extensive interviewing is being performed to determine prevailing understandings or misconceptions about tornadoes and volcanoes and to develop self-interest questions that guide the development and use of the virtual tools. Appropriate teaching approaches to use with the simulations are being developed. These approaches will greatly impact future development and implementation of simulations across a broad range of educational settings.
