This research measures the effect of viewing electronic course materials such as
educational documentaries, images, and animations on students’ geographic novelty space pertaining to up-coming field stops on field trips. Specifically, the research evaluates the impact of topographic animated fly-throughs created with Google Earth Pro™ on student geographic
novelty space during GeoJourney. GeoJourney is a field program at Bowling Green State University during which students embark on a 14,500 mile field trip that takes them around the
United States while they learn key introductory concepts in geology, Native American studies, and environmental science. The program is nine weeks long and involved 25 undergraduate
students in 2007.
This project comprised ten topographic animated fly-throughs, which are a compilation of various geologically significant field sites from Yosemite National Park, Glacier National
Park, Mount St. Helens, Death Valley National Park, Badlands National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. The animations were saved as movies and
placed on video iPods for viewing while traveling to the field sites on GeoJourney. A mixed method
assessment, using both quantitative Novelty Space Survey data and video-taped
interviews, was performed to measure the effectiveness of the animations in decreasing geographic novelty space.
Results from this study indicated a decrease in geographic novelty space. The
quantitative analysis of the Novelty Space Survey results using a Repeated Measures ANOVA yielded a p-value of 0.0026 with an F-value of 11.40. The results of the video-taped interviews provided supporting evidence to the quantitative analysis portion of the study, showing that
students used the animated fly-throughs to better understand the geographic context of sites before they arrived at them. Hence, the fly-throughs played a role in the overall decrease of geographic novelty space.