BioDive

BioDive is an immersive dual virtual reality/digital experience where players are marine biologists investigating the delicate ecosystems of venomous marine snails. Throughout their expedition, students observe, discover, and hypothesize about abiotic and biotic factors that impact marine biodiversity. Players work in online personalized digital science journals to takes notes about what they experienced, answer questions, develop hypotheses and construct models. Then students go to the virtual world to test their hypothesis, just like career scientists go on expeditions. When the students return from virtual reality, they show their observations, claims, reasoning and evidence. The virtual reality experience can be accessed by any web-enabled device. Aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards and created by practicing scientists and educators, BioDive combines web-based virtual reality and personalized digital journaling to enable students to experience the life of a scientist. This immersive educational game was developed for use in grades 5-9 and includes three interlinked components: a personalized website, mobile/web-based virtual reality, and an educator dashboard. BioDive, described in a TED talk (How Virtual Reality Turns Students into Scientists”) viewed over 500,000 times, was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation.