Martian Boneyards
Blue Mars Science Center: Designing a Virtual Science Learning Environment
Lead Staff:
Jodi Asbell-ClarkeTeon Edwards
SummaryThrough the Blue Mars Science Center project, EdGE and Virtual Space Entertainment (VSE) developed Martian Boneyards—a game of scientific collaboration in a high-definition massively-multiplayer online environment (MMO) called Blue Mars.
Martian Boneyards, which launched in 2010 and ran for four months, presented an unfolding story set in the terraformed world of Arcadia with a mystery about how bones and artifacts came together near the outskirts of the region. Players hunted for the bones and other artifacts, compared, sorted, identified, measured, and otherwise analyzed them, and used their findings as evidence to build and revise claims about what may have occurred.
Martian Boneyards raised many questions that required scientific investigation and the game rewarded players for gathering and analyzing data and eventually using the data of the community to build evidence-based claims about what happened in the boneyards.
Videos
Connected WorkMartian Boneyards: Sustained Scientific Inquiry in a Social Digital Game by Jodi Asbell-Clarke (PDF)
Through the Blue Mars Science Center project, EdGE and Virtual Space Entertainment (VSE) developed Martian Boneyards—a game of scientific collaboration in a high-definition massively-multiplayer online environment (MMO) called Blue Mars.
Martian Boneyards, which launched in 2010 and ran for four months, presented an unfolding story set in the terraformed world of Arcadia with a mystery about how bones and artifacts came together near the outskirts of the region. Players hunted for the bones and other artifacts, compared, sorted, identified, measured, and otherwise analyzed them, and used their findings as evidence to build and revise claims about what may have occurred.
Martian Boneyards raised many questions that required scientific investigation and the game rewarded players for gathering and analyzing data and eventually using the data of the community to build evidence-based claims about what happened in the boneyards.
Connected WorkMartian Boneyards: Sustained Scientific Inquiry in a Social Digital Game by Jodi Asbell-Clarke (PDF)
Martian Boneyards: Sustained Scientific Inquiry in a Social Digital Game by Jodi Asbell-Clarke (PDF)
Research / Evaluation
Science
TechnologyFunder:
National Science Foundation
Award Number:
0917520
