Developed for the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s EcoMOD project, this multi-year development effort “explores the power of immersive virtual environments to support computational thinking and ecosystem science learning in elementary grades”. Using both 2D and 3D immersive environments, students could model the behavior of either a beaver or a woodpecker across several years to observer and test various survival strategies. Then switching back to the human researcher role in the application, they could collect further data, photograph organisms, investigate field guide data, and more to build a rich understanding of the many factors involved in ecosystem science. In the 2D “sandbox” environment they could use visual block programming to define the behavior of a beaver, observing the consequences in 2D before moving to the 3D immersive environment to see a more complete picture of the virtual ecosystem.

Unity

C#

3D

2D

AI Behavior Trees

Harvard Graduate School of Education’s EcoMOD project