GCX: 1 Geologic Time

“Grand Canyon Expedition” is a set of three educational virtual field trips set in a scaled-down Grand Canyon, Arizona, for teaching introductory undergraduate geoscience concepts. This game is based on relative GPS locations, designed to take advantage of the GPS capabilities of mobile devices. Relative GPS takes your current location and sets it as the origin for the rest of the game. All of the objects, locations, and distances that the player interacts with can then be generated based off of the initial starting point. The location of the player does not matter; the player could be in the United States, Japan, Africa, and Europe or anywhere in the world. You will need a football field, campus quad, or substantially sized park to play this game.

This GPS game will take you virtually rafting down the Colorado River, along the way stopping at amazing places that help us decipher Earth’s vast history.

Upon arrival at each location, imagery from that place within Grand Canyon appears. Text describing the location and a video with audio reading the text is also playable. The text window can (and should) be scrolled down to see all the information. Following the description there is a question based on the geology content the module covers. Some questions are followed by an “iSpy” activity where the player must interact with the touchscreen of their device as well. You must successfully complete each question in order to progress to the next location and the next question. Scoring is based on the number of attempts per question.