Wichita State College has been consistently holding Geology Field camp for the enrolled students, but this year, due to the pandemic, the camp was cancelled by the college. However, William Parcell, the professor has made the camp possible, by offering a creative solution for the students forced to stay indoors.
Geology Field camp cancelled? Professor utilizes Minecraft to give students the camp they want! He said, ‘It’s about exploration, Just having videos, and lecturing, and then doing a test doesn’t really get at the heart of what field geology is really all about’.
William Parcell is an associate professor as well as chair of the geology department at the Wichita State University. He has been working on providing virtual experiences to the students that are unable to go out in the wilderness.
William Parcell was initially looking to develop a virtual version of the camp and the current pandemic turned out to be the perfect time for showing off the virtual version of the camp to the students. MrParcell made use of a combination of satellite photography and topographic maps of the Bighorn Basin region to recreate the desired region through a series of Minecraft worlds that resembles those regions.
The camp usually features students travelling for their capstone field geology course to Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin. This course lets the students hike together across sagebrush deserts and up steep mountains in order to get real-life experience in examining rocks and collecting data of the surrounding area.
This is pretty similar to the way of creation of ElseWither during this pandemic. ElseWither is the recreation of the renowned night club of Elsewhere. It is an indie-music club, located in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. This recreation has already received a huge response.
Minecraft is perhaps just the right game for the recreation of this camp, the adaptability, and easy scalability are the two main components that help in making Minecraft widely used when recreating. It is the perfect game for making recreations of vast landscapes with its blocky graphics, which offers an easy way of building.
This virtual camp is very much similar to the camps of the Connected Camps offers. Connected camps also make use of Minecraft in offering a wide range of camps.
Over 10,000 young people have participated in the online programs of Connected Camps in the last five years. Connected Camps offers many games as medium and utilizes Roblox, Minecraft, and others for providing summer camps from at the students’ convenience.
