Preprints  

To determine best strategies for geoscience communication on TikTok, we created a TikTok account called “Terra Explore.” We produced 48 educational geoscience videos and evaluated each video’s performance. Our most viewed videos received nearly all of their views from TikTok’s algorithmic recommendation feed, and the videos that went the most viral were related to a recent newsworthy event (e.g., earthquake) or explaining the geology of a recognizable area.

In this paper we describe a process where geoscientists corresponded with school classes in 3 different countries using handwritten letters and polaroid photo albums. The stories they told were based on their experiences in a research expedition in the Arctic. We evaluated the process and show some of the benefits the students experienced corresponding with the scientists in this way.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus, released in early 2022, is set in the virtual region of Hisui, which is based on the real-world island of Hokkaido, Japan. By comparing in-game geological features, landscapes, and place names to real counterparts in Hokkaido, we demonstrate how it is possible to use popular video games to learn about a range of geoscientific concepts from real-world places. These results are encouraging for the use of popular video games to be used as an educational tool.

Fifty documents with input from farmers, rangeland managers, and water resource managers were analyzed to understand climate information needs in the U.S. Corn Belt. Practitioners want information to help them make agricultural, water, and risk management decisions to improve economic outcomes. These results can inform decision support tool development, summarize background information for future research in the Corn Belt, and provide an example for research in other sectors and geographies.

Participants answered four questions concerning their experience writing a haiku based on a geoscience extract. Data were categorised as being part of the ‘Task Process’ or ‘Task Meaning’. The themes involved in the ‘Task Process’ were ‘Identification of significant information’, ‘Distillation of information’, and ‘Metamorphosis of text’, while the themes related to ‘Task Meaning’ were made up of ‘Enjoyable’, ‘Challenging (which has subthemes ‘Frustrating’ and ‘Restricted’), and ‘Valuable’.

In this manifesto, we offer six points of reflection that higher education geoscience educators can act upon to recognize and unlearn their biases and diversify the geosciences in higher education, complementing current calls for institutional and organizational change. This serves as a starting point to gather momentum to establish community-built opportunities for implementing and strengthening diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice holistically in geoscience education.

Video games are the largest sector of the entertainment industry and often contain ancient animals (e.g. dinosaurs) and/or fossils. This may be the first or only exposure gamers have to palaeontology and it provides a useful starting point for science outreach. However, video games are not typically designed to be educational. We investigate the use of palaeontology in video games and highlight common tropes that may mislead the public and skew their perception of palaeontological science.

Climate change is increasing the risk of weather hazards (i.e. Storms and Heatwaves). Using open science methods it is shown that there is a bias in weather hazard reporting. Storms have had a large number of articles in the last five years. But, wildfires have a large number of articles per individual occurrence. Science and media collaborations could address the bias and improve reporting.

This paper reports on research insights from a collaboration between UK climate scientists and artist researchers to advocate for a more creative and emotionally attentive approach to climate science engagement and advocacy. The paper highlights innovative ways in which climate change communication can be re-imagined through different art forms to enable complex concepts to become knowable, accessible and engaging to wider publics.

’Think Like A Scientist’ is a geoscience course designed to improve critical thinking and encourage independent thought for people in prison. Based on course feedback, we outline practical advice when dealing with students who do not engage in formal education – specifically for students who have no confidence in themselves or the education system. To tackle this, we focus on how to create a classroom dynamic that is accessible, inclusive, and relatable to students from all backgrounds. 

The aim of this paper is to communicate results of our survey giving a first overview and reflects how teaching of hydrology and water related sciences changed due to COVID-19. Next to many negative aspects for teachers and students, also a spirit of optimism, time of change and community initiatives could be noticed. COVID-19 made it possible to explore novel teaching methods which useful to modernize education and make practical teaching formats accessible for all hydrology and water students.

How do kids imagine the onset and outcome of a volcanic eruption? A workshop proposed to the schools tries to answer this question by collecting stories written and drawn by kids and youngsters (age 6–13). The eruption they have in mind is an excellent starting point to build classroom conversations about volcanic risk and its mitigation. At the same time, the workshop provided us valuable hints to improve educational materials and lesson plans accounting for kids’ knowledge and beliefs

In this paper we discuss the instrumental role of the press in informing and educating on the subject of climate science and climate change. We illustrate with an example of a dissemination format called Weather Stories, published daily in one of the most read newspapers in Spain. The particularities of this journalistic format are described with a practical example on how a relatively complex physical concept: the jet stream.

Virtual fieldtrips have become a crucial resource during the COVID-19 pandemic within geoscience education. This study presents a critical evaluation of their use, using real world examples delivered to a masters level class at the University of Aberdeen. Our work highlights several key findings which can be used to help plan virtual field trips, and how associated disadvantages of their use can be mitigated through a blend of physical and virtual fieldtrips.

Virtual field trips have been used to engage students unable to go in the field with geological field work. Here we investigate the perceptions of staff and students before and after a virtual field trip; including investigating the success of mitigation measures designed to decrease barriers to engagement and inclusion. We conclude that negative and positive perceptions exist and that effective mitigations can be used to improve the student experience.

Our pedagogic framework suggests that using living labs for educational purposes can provide environments where authentic activities and assessment can be readily provided, create an environment where students become stakeholders in adjunct processes, help educators work toward inclusive and authentic alternatives to residential fieldwork (where needed), and provide alternative fieldwork (and other activities) locations to help rationalise curricula financial and environmental footprints.

Geology in not apolitical. Here we explore what Decolonising the Curriculum means, both in a wider sense, but specifically for the discipline of geology. We outline some of geologies colnial past, and point to its colonial present, in the hope that we can do better in the future. We explain some of the discipline-specific jargon associated with decol. Some suggestions are included to help geology teams begin their Decolonising the Curriculum journey.

The news media has been identified as one of the ways weather hazard risk can be communicated. However, hazards become subject to newsworthiness. Here, it is presented that the media focus of Northern Hemisphere Summer 2021 was storms and flooding. This is despite the fact there were also a number of high profile extremes for heat waves, droughts and wildfires.

Current science communication initiatives in universities draws from media and journalism to encourage scientists to be competent communicators of their research in order to show the relevance of scientific knwowledge to societal concerns. An alternative but less popular source of inspiration is from marketing and public relations. Here, science communication is reappraised through the lens of three leading marketing paradigms: 'make and sell', 'sense and respind' and 'guide and co-create'.

Geoscience courses, such as geology and geomorphology, require not only classroom lessons and laboratory exercises, but field trips as well. Here, we performed a virtual navigation on Naxos Isl., Cyclades (Greece) for a series of virtual field trips, which took place during webinars in the framework of Erasmus+ CIVIS. Taking into consideration the feedback from 100 students we evaluate the effectiveness of virtual fieldtrips as an alternative form of education.

We designed interactive, open-ended video games that simulate field geology to address the learning goals of traditional, in-person exercises for geology students. When these simulations were implemented in college courses, students used virtual versions of standard geology measuring tools to collect data but could also visualize and collect data in new ways, with a jetpack and instantaneous graphing tools. The games were for remote learning, but the tools can also enhance in-person instruction.

Geological (Engineering) Field Methods is a core course at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada where students learn how to investigate the Earth. Typically, this course involves weekly field trips to visit a variety of rock outcrops to learn navigation, observation, and measurement. Remote delivery of this course in fall 2020 due to COVID-19 required a transformation using new virtual, manual, and blended tools. Although largely successful, a return to in-person teaching is recommended.

GAIA 5.0 presents based on concepts from Plato to Poincaré, the Earth as hypersphere, and as complex living system embedded into a multi-dimensional dynamic space model based on 5-dimensional hyper-Euclidean geometry. It visualizes a coupled atmosphere-ocean dynamics model by using ECMWF reanalysis data sets of the very severe cyclonic storms (Luban & Titli) over the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal (2016). Finally a discrete model for the formation of aerosol is suggested.

We have continued the interdisciplinary study on climate and music and have developed the crosscutting study plans on the climate and cultural understanding education, for promoting the Fundamental ESD Literacy. This review article re-integrates the results of our studies referring to our papers written in Japanese, mainly paying attention to the regional characteristics of the seasonal cycles and the songs/traditional seasonal events around Germany, Northern Europe and Japan.

Everybody experiences weather and has, likely, a grasp on the notion of different climates. There are discussions on how to define climate, since climate is a policy-relevant topic. Here, I try to clarify why the saying Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get is an appropriate definition that, however, depends on the definition of what may be seen as weather.

The measurement of knowledge transfer is considered an important component of the overall performance assessment of research groups. It is, however, not a trivial task, because there is agreement on neither the definition nor on the logical structure of knowledge. In this paper related problems are summarized and approaches to the measurement of knowledge transfer are critically discussed.

A simulation tool has been realized with which the sensitivity of the Earth climate system to human interference can be studied. The tool is intended to offer users of the software, e.g. students in higher education, support in gaining insight into critical aspects of the climate system and thus counteracting common misconceptions with regard to the functioning of this system. The conceptual design of the tool is based on the paradigm learning as experimenting.