Thank you. Pull Boy, How do I follow that talk? Uh, I will give my best to
it. So yes, I'm going to talk today about place based teaching. Sort of Ah
, brief introduction general about the idea. But in particular, I want to
talk about to, uh, to specific projects that we've been involved in
the trail of time at Grand Canyon and a virtual field trip of Grand Canyon
, both of which are actually related to each other. But now I know Carl.
Yesterday, Mike, my colleague Carl costume wasn't able to stay. Could
have been a co author on this talk very easily. Asked how many geologists
were in the audience. How many geographers air here? Yes, You have a lot
more geographers and we do geologists. And I'm a geologist by training in
them and ethno geologist. Bye bye research. But I claim very much that I
have learned a great deal from geographers and and for the job offers in
this room. Some of this introductory stuff might be kind of routine for
you and I hope you'LL bear with me, but the idea place Okay, places come
up over and over again in this conference and many different definitions
for place. But I I prefer to use the one that geographers typically use,
which is a locality that's been given meaning through human experience.
Great job for such a seafood. Tuan have written extensively on this idea
, and we just think about Grand Canyon. The grant, a landscape that is so
meaningful, has been so meaningful to so many different cultures and
people through millennia. And we could think about all the different kinds
of meanings that have been a fixed two Grand Canyon through human
occupation of Grand Canyon through human history, beauty and allure.
People come from all around the world to soak in the great beauty of Grand
Canyon, the fact that it's still a homeland to twelve different Native
American nations. Culturally important, Carl talked yesterday about
geologic mapping. I mean, Grand Canyon exposes about two billion years of
the Earth's history, and there are few places on earth that are so rich
with with significant scientific significance. But as we've also talked
about, this is a watershed year for Grand Canyon being both the
sesquicentennial, the Powell expedition and the centennial of the national
park. And so there's There's more recent historical significance, great
educational value, recreational value but also disputes right disputes
over issues such as uranium mining and water quality and water resource
use over the years. So all of these things make it a place. And the thing
about place meaning is that each time somebody experiences a place, each
time somebody gives it a name or somebody does something, innit? It adds
to this to the store of place. Meaning, You know, I really enjoyed that
presentation on the cartoon maps today because again, I like to use them
in my teaching to because as a geologist, when I'm trying to express this
idea place to geology students, most of whom have been trained in this
sort of very physical science perspective, I like Teo Teo turn to
geographer like Carl Sour. You know, again, this is this is kind of old
school in the geographic Rome. But Teo, geologist, this stuff is still has
a lot of great value and teaching that that we have these interconnected,
interwoven physical and cultural landscapes. And since really, there's
nowhere on Earth that human beings have not either set foot or at least
looked at or thought about the cultural landscape is all pervasive, and
the cartoon maps are wonderful way of showing that interweaving between
the cultural and the physical landscape or the natural landscape. And what
I like to tell my students are if they want to think of places as the
cultural equivalence of landforms in the physical landscape. OK, there's
different kinds of processes that create places, but but we can think of
them in that way. And so place is a human construct, But we make places in
places, make us places influence the way that we think places influenced
the way that we live. And since I'm interested in the teaching of geology
otter interest in the fact that that our connection to place influences
the way we understand the Earth, how the Earth works, you can't teach
Earth. Science can teach any natural science really without engaging with
places. We do it end and by means of places. So, as Paul mentioned, I
spent the first fifteen years of my career teaching on the Navajo Nation,
that Dinner college, the tribal college of Navajo Nation, and I was a
Western trained geologist. I came out there to teach her science and I
would go out into the field of my students. The school is ninety five
percent Native American, and I go out with a field of my students and I
talk about the geology and we'd look at the rocks. When we look at the
land forms, we talk about the processes. And then when I was done, my
students would tell me how they understood the land and how they saw the
land. And I came to really appreciate how important the context the place
is for teaching in the geosciences. And so my interaction with the native
community on the Navajo Nation got me very interested in this idea. Place
based education. Probably a lot of people have heard of that phrase. Pali
People in this room practice place based education, although interestingly
enough, that term didn't actually show up on the literature till about
nineteen seventy eight, even though it is ancestral, because it is the
indigenous way of teaching and always has been people who have strong
connections to land, they teach in a place based way. I like this quote by
Greg Smith, who is one of the great scholars of place based education that
place based education is what happened before schools were created. Um,
and here's an example of one that we were doing not at the Grand Canyon
but above the canyon of the San Juan River. It was a course that
integrated both scientific and cultural knowledge. Is Benny Brigade was a
top Flee your medicine man who was talking with us there. Now, when you
get to national parks like Grand Canyon, we have this concept of
interpretation. The teaching method that is indigenous to national parks
is called interpretation, but it really is place based education of
another form. Because again, what you're doing here is helping visitors
make both intellect, actual and emotional connections to the landscape.
That's that's the definition of interpretation, and that is that is,
fundamentally a very place based way of teaching. So this idea of using
place as context and relevance for teaching what in many cases is very
concept heavy science is something that I'm very interested in, and I have
been practicing and studying in the Earth sciences for a number of years,
and the rest of the time here I want to talk about to very specific
examples of how we apply some of these methods to place based teaching at
the Grand Canyon, one that is in person, the trail of time exhibition and
one that is virtually the Grand Canyon immersive virtual field trips. I'LL
start with The Trail of Time. So The Trail of Time is a exhibition that
was funded by the National Science Foundation, and I was part of fortunate
to be part of the team that designed and created it. And it is very much
at Grand. Can you tell how many people have been on the trail of time, by
the way? Oh, I'm really glad to see that. Good. That's quite a few hands.
Okay, so at Grand Canyon, we have a dynamic natural landscape that
encodes almost two billion one point eight four billion years of geologic
history. Maybe one point nine if you count the age of some of the grains
there in some of the oldest rocks there, but also a cultural landscape and
codes that name's experiences and lives of people over many millennia. And
if you go to the South Rim, you go the south rim of the park. You can
experience a great deal of this. You can go to the wonderful Geologic
Museum, but they have a yabba pie point. You could go to the cultural
museums. You can go to the camps. You could go to Mather Point. You could
go Teo Desert View where they're going to be establishing a new Native
American cultural center in the next couple of years. But, you know, if
you really want to get the whole picture, you got to go down into the
canyon. You've got to get down there, you got to get down into the oldest
rocks. You got to get down by the river. And here's a fundamental problem
because somewhere between five and six million people visit Grand Canyon
up on the South Rim and to some extent, the North Rim. But a small
fraction of that group actually gets down below the river and or ever will
be able do for either reasons of accessibility or socio economic reasons,
or just because they're never going to win the lottery, you know, and get
a get a boat trip. But how can we bring the experience that these lucky
visitors and I count myself fortunate? Having been able to take several
River trips myself up to the people who are coming up to the to the
Southland. How could we bring that experience up two people in the South
Rim and hence the trail of time. The Trail of Time was conceived as an
accessible timeline trail to introduce Grand Canyon geologic history to as
many visitors as possible using place based teaching elements, and we
quite modestly refer to it as the world's largest geoscience exhibition at
the world's grandest geological landscape. OK, that's kind of a marketing
speak there, but the whole point about the trail of time is that it is a
It is an exhibition that allows visitors to experience the great panoramic
vistas of Grand Canyon as well as the rocks that are found in Grand Canyon.
All the rocks that occur in the canyon, brought up to the to the trail as
well as carefully configured interpretive resource, is so that they can
ponder not just the history of Grand Canyon itself, but the very idea of
how big geologic time is in very kinesthetic sense. So it's a it's an
accessible trail. It's along the South Rim trail kinesthetic as well as
visual. It was funded by the National Science Foundation. All credit to
them with a great deal of logistical and in kind. Support from the Park
Service is Well, obviously we could not have done this if not for the
support of the Park Service. And I'm proud to say that the National
Association for Interpretation gave it a first place award for
interpreting Median twenty eleven the year after it was first developed.
So I want to I want to point out that it was a huge team that created the
trail of time and the Trail of Time was first conceived by Carl Carlstrom
and and his wife and colleague Laurie Crossing Cross. Carl spoke yesterday.
Carlin Laurie were here, but they were unable to stay because they had to
move on to it. Another geo science conference. But they were the ones that
first thought of the idea, and then they brought all the rest of us
together with diverse disciplines, people in geo science, education,
people in exhibit design people in interpretation right here. Like Judy
Helmet. Brian was the chief of interpretation at the park At the time.
Ellen Seeley was an interpretive ranger is still an interpretive ranger.
People who are expert in exhibit design an assessment as well. And with
two and two point three million dollars from the NSF, we were often
running. So we conceived of the trail of time as a walking timeline that
it's scaled. So in other words, in the middle part of the trail, we had
markers that were spaced about a meter apart. So it's kind of the
equivalent of one long, and that represents one million years and so four
point five kilometers laid out along the South Rim. From you have a pie
point all the way out to Maricopa Point here, uh, encompassed four point
five billion years or the history of the Earth. And then this first
segment here, which we call the main trail of time going out to two
thousand million years or two billion years, that encompasses the history
of the rocks that actually occur in Grand Canyon. One of the things we're
really proud of of two is we think that this is the probably the best
evaluated to your science exhibition in the entire national park system.
And that's because when NSF funds money, they want a great deal of
evaluation research done with it. So even before we did anything at the
park, we did mock ups at issue. We had the corridors of several buildings
around here. We set up mock up trail of time and we had people come. And
we basically wanted to know whether they could understand that they were
walking on a timeline on Would they be able to navigate the scale changes
? Would they be able to understand the spacing on the trail and how
related to geologic history? And then what we learned from there we placed
out to the park itself. And I'm very happy to say this was the most fun
project I've ever been involved in. We had four years of basically playing
at the South Rim with these with these interpretive resource is and then
just ask people what they thought. So what we would do is we would put
mock ups of the interpretive signs and the markers on the trail, and we
would watch people OK, now we wouldn't want this to be creepy. So we put
signs up here that said, You know, we are here observing, and we all wore
markers so people knew why we were there to ask questions. But we asked
visitors Well, what do you think of this? And we would actually make
changes to the science right there. Like we would ask him if they would
understand the concept. And if it wasn't clear, we put masking tape over
and we'd rewrite it and say, Does this make more sense now? And so this is
what was called rapid rapid interpretation and sorry, rapid prototyping.
And we did this and it worked pretty well to get the to get the design
down. And so from two thousand seven to about twenty ten, we had the
construction. We actually have to build much of it ourselves. We got some
in kind support from the park and it was dedicated and turned over to the
Park service in twenty ten. So the components of the trail of time, the
first part that's important is what we call a million year trail of the on
ramp. And this is the idea that it basically takes you from a human
perspective of time to a geologic perspective. At one end of the trail,
the spacing is one meter per year. So you can actually walk on the trail.
We love to do this with students. We take him up there. We say, Go find
the marker on the trail that corresponds to your age, right? So I'm like,
way out there somewhere. Okay? And these are my students and there's
there's my dog. That's not dog years. That's that's human years. But it
works well for dogs to. And the idea there is that that as you walk the
trail, you you notice the scale is changing lager rhythmically. And by the
time you get about three hundred meters down the trail, you're now to a
point where it's one meter per million years and then you're ready to walk.
The main part of the trail on the trail of time is introduced by these
wonderful rock portals, which recapitulate the geologic cross section of
Grand Canyon using the real rocks. Okay, these are the actual rock units
from Grand Canyon, with the exception of the basement rock which came from
Colorado, actually, but it is essentially the same stuff that's down at
the bottom of the inner gorge. That's one of the main components. The
portal's air, located at all ends of the trail. And also there's a there's
a breakout point with the shrine of Ages. Trail comes in and we have the
the portal there too, in case people enter from that point sort of the
heart of the exhibition of the trail markers. Okay, we have twenty five
hundred markers that were displayed along the trail. Every one of them was
one meter apart. Um, for the main part of the trail, we had these
medallions which indicate the time, and they're space ten meters apart.
And in between we have the small individual meters of markers. So
basically, you walk nine of these and then you get to the next one of
these, which is ten and you're walking out the history of the trail. We
did not use billions. We decided to stick with million. So, for example,
instead of saying one point six eight billion, we said one point six
sixteen eighty million because testing indicated that was easier than
shifting a lot of time terms, it was easier for people to handle just
million the whole way. One of the interesting stories about this when we
designed these markers is we had no idea that the inside diameter of one
of these markets was exactly the same as the diameter of a penny. Okay,
and not long after we established the trail, people started sticking
pennies into those markers until every one of those twenty four hundred
markers the individual ones, was filled with pennies. We like that because
that shows that people are interacting with the exhibition, and if
anything, it's helping to preserve the preserve the resource. So we're
fine with that. Another major component. The Trail of time or the wayside
panels. Seventeen panels designed to park service specifications. But what
actually went into those panels? That was about three years worth of
steady teleconferencing and debate and arguments, which on DH, the rapid
prototyping on site, which led to designs with very conversational textile.
The idea here is that we want to grab people's attention, but we don't
want to be oppressive, so we would have a phrase like Vishnu rocks or near
the canyon's bottom, and you could walk by and that's all you learn.
That's fine. You learned something about the Vishnu schist, but if you
want to stop, then you could read a little bit more and then you could
look at the graphics, and so you can actually kind of draws you in tow.
Learn more about the history of the different rock units, and along the
bottom of every one of these in Servant of Signs is a map showing where
you are on the trail of that at that point. So we had a number of these,
and they and the first one is right here. This sort of introduces the idea
of what a timeline is, and then this one talks about the age of the canyon.
It's exactly six meters from the start, and then at the far end, the
oldest rocket, Grand Canyon is the elves chasm Nice, which is one point
eight four billion years old. And that's the sign that represents it
beyond Grand Canyon Village. There are no markers in Grand Canyon Village
because it's a historic site, but the trail picks up again at the right
point outside Grand Canyon Village and goes on to four and a half billion
years, four point five kilometers. Since there are no rocks at Grand
Canyon that air that old it basically the interpretive signs. Just talk
about Earth history at that point. And yes, out of thirteen point seven
kilometers away from the start of the trail, we do have a marker for the
Big Bang. So there is. There is one out there. You can go find it. Um,
view tubes. We had a view tubes that point to certain outcrops. Very
simple. They're just brass tubes that fit the slot. One that's for kids or
people in a wheelchair. That's one for taller people. And they point
directly to features like the bright angel shale with very simple text
that goes along with it. Um, the rocks are probably the most fun part of
the trail. The people like the best. There are about forty five different
depending on how you whether you're geologic lum Paro geologic splitter.
There about forty five different rock units that occurred within the
Grand Canyon system on Lee, a couple of them are actually encountered.
Ifyou're on the rim pretty much if you walk on the rim, it's Kaibab
limestone all the way. Okay, A few places you might see something else. So
all of these rock samples were brought up from the park depths from the
depths of the canyon with the permission of the park. Most of them were
brought out on boats. Okay, if you're familiar with how a scientific river
trip goes particularly geologic trip, the way it works is when you put in
at least bury your your boats are loaded down with the beverage is OK. And
then all along the course, the river, you drink the beverages, you flatten
the hands and they go into a small space and you have to have something to
take up. The volume were the beverages where before? So what's it going to
be? Well, obviously rocks. So we collect the rock samples. So we come in
with beverages, we come out with rock samples, and that's how a lot of
these rocks were brought out. Some of the bigger ones the park service
actually allowed US helicopter service actually went to see a helicopter
to bring them out. So every single rock formation that is a cat
encountered in Grand Canyon is placed along the trail at the time marker
corresponding to its age, each rock was chosen for its durability and also
chosen for its it's interpretive value. Each one has well polished and
unpolished surfaces so you can see it. And as you can see, the plants were
designed to be to be loved to death. Okay, We love to have people stand on
the rock, sit on the rocks, draw pencils, pencils, rubbings of the rocks
and so on. And each one of them. It's kind of another interesting story at
the corner of each one of these plants. We originally had a little wording
that said, Please touch. We want people to touch these rocks when people
interact with them. But when we did our prototyping and we showed please
touch people saw that and you know how they read it? They read it as
please don't touch, because that's what everybody is used to s O. So
instead, they say, Touch me. Okay, we have that. That's another one of the
things that we learned from the evaluation. So, um, the trail of time has
also facilitated some research on interpretation of this was my master
student, Becky Fruits. Once we put it in there, we were interested in how
people interacted with the trail and how they learned. And one of the
things we were very gratified, sort of after the fact was that the
visitors were getting the basic ideas of geologic time. The relative
sequence in which superposition which rocks were deposited correlation of
units across both sides of the canyon. The trail was able to teach that
very effectively. Most of that work was published. It's on there. So if
anybody wants to build a trail of time in another place, that material is
there for people to to read and redesign and people be happy. I have my
website up. In the end, they would be happy to share that information with
the one who's interested. But for the last couple of minutes, if I talk, I
think I've got about five more minutes. Something like that. I'd like to
talk a little bit about the other side of place based teaching the virtual
side. Okay, Um, we had a s. You are also very interested in immersive
virtual field trips. Okay, because we recognize that that even though I'm
a dyed in the wool field geologist, I realized that there are many places
in this world that air geologically, they're places that are pedagogic Lee
, powerful, geologically rich. But they're accessible on ly to a relative
you. And if we're going to share the pedagogical value, the instructional
value relating too geology or geography or ecology or anything, we're
gonna have to find a different way to bring it to students. And the way we
do that is through technology. And so we have been pioneers and the idea
of immersive virtual field trips. Web hosted three hundred sixty degree
immersive environments set all around the world, including Grand Canyon,
and this is the website. You can go to this website right now and you,
Khun, or later on, and you can encounter any one of these field trips and
you can take it right there on any device. It's a phone or a tablet or
computer. So with another grant from the National Science Foundation. My
colleague Jeffrey Bruce, who's here, who's a videographer, and Professor
Arlan Bar, a colleague of mine today s U. We went on a Carl Carlstrom
River trip in twenty thirteen, and we collected an enormous amount of
video footage and we came up with this virtual field trip. I'm gonna
hopefully this is going to work,
you know, it's one thing. It's one thing I can talk about this But the
best way to show it is it's just gonna work. Let's see. Maybe I have to
get out of this presentation and I'm running out of time here, so let me
you see if it should be OK, here we go. Anybody see that? So if you go to
the FT and you go to the Grand Canyon and you click on the vent the Grand
Canyon, it'LL take to splash page like that and they're two options. We
have what we call a free inquiry virtual field trip and a guided increase
field trip which takes you up Black Canyon, which gives you a good and
expert exposure to the great un conformity. So I'm going to just very
briefly show you what you what you get when you jump into one of these
trips is it plops you down in right at the neck a week Grand Aries in the
canyon. Okay. And you have a three hundred and sixty degree panorama. You
could look up, you could look down, you can navigate around, and embedded
in the screen are all kinds of video and audio of aids. Like, for example
, this is Giga Pan. So if you're familiar with Giga Pan, Giga Pan is a
wonderful technology that that stitches hundreds of high resolution
photographs together. So there you have the wall of the Paleozoic rocks
looking across on the ground a reason. It's a pretty big image. But what
you can do is you can zoom in, and what you find when you zoom in is the
resolution. Is Justus high? No matter how close you get? That's the
wonderful thing about Giga Pants. So it actually allows you to go places
in the canyon that you could not go to without, you know, without being a
mountain climber, that sort of thing. So we have that,
and we have a number of let's see if I can close that up. We have a number
of instructional videos that talk about Grand Canyon geology. So, for
example, here we have yours truly. We also have videos by Karl Carlstrom
and Lori Cross e talking about the geology of Grand Canyon at all of these
different locations. So we have these videos that kind of moderate, what's
going on as well to talk about the rock layers, Um, and then we have, ah,
humans thinks we have a Google map page. Here. We have about thirty some
odd stops along the river that you can travel to. You could travel to them
either by jumping on the map or you can just click to the next thing. I
also want to show you we have one kind of cool set of videos here. See if
I can show this one last time minutes. This is called three hundred sixty
degree video. Okay, so here we are. We drive, we're floating down the
canyon and look what you can do.
You can look in all directions at all times.
So here we are, looking down through the basement rocks.
Look at that. I mean, look at the beautiful basement. You can see those
Vishnu schist and you can see the the very furry Jeffrey Bruce down there
, and and that you could see the rocks are spectacular. So we have all of
these different videos and you could navigate up and down the canyon. Okay
, So you can go and you click on the little Green Doc's here and they
could take you up. For example, this is hiking up like a weed canyon. You
can go all the way up through the Butte fault up into the to our valley.
And every one of these locations has all these tremendous resource is as
well as these wonderful three hundred sixty degree panoramas. So running
out of time, I'd love to just, like, take you on this trip for the next
hours. So But I would encourage you to have a look at that at your leisure.
And I'll just sort of finish up when I go
so Ivy FT Technology offers access and perspectivas have shown that are
not always readily accessible. Insitu a CZ Well, as all of these other
interpretive resource is that we put in there, we have done some research
on pairing both e in person trip the Trail of time with the IVF T. And I
have a student here who recently completed his masters and is now
finishing his phD. And the bottom line is that the virtual field trip is
not really a competition for the in person field trip. If anything, it
complements it. Because most students the first time they have in the
field experience, they tend to be very preoccupied by things other than
learning. They worry about what they're gonna wear, where they have to go
, the bathroom, where they're going to eat that sort of thing. The nice
thing about a virtual field trip is it can help him get over those
preoccupations before they actually go out into the Yeah, So this is the
research that's underway. We're still in the process of integrating the
IVF technology and the field based technology through the trail of time in
in a more effective way, and so I think I will end here. If you're
interested in checking out the Grand Canyon VF t, there's the website. If
you're interested in the trail of time, there's the website and if I can
answer any further questions for you, there's my website. One thing I want
to draw attention to is that in September, September twenty second, the
Geological Society of America is going to hold this annual meeting right
here in Phoenix. And so it's a great opportunity for those of you who are
interested in Grand Canyon. There going to be a number of sessions related
to Grand Canyon happening at this conference. So you've never been to a G
s a meeting before. It's going to be right here in town, so I would
certainly encourage you to look into it. And I'd be happy to answer
questions about that, too, because I'm also working on that meeting
something. Thank you very much.
Do we have any questions, Dr Somethin, Steve?
Questions for Steve.
Um uh there's great presentation. And, uh, I'm looking at all that this
talk and as well as other talks through the lens of perspective of a
botanist, and I want to say that obvious toxin in years included, uh,
really helps our work and studying plants. Uh, within Grand Canyon. One of
the one of my, uh it's actually a common is so glad that you brought out
that Ah, with the cultural as well as natural landscape in is ah, uh,
botanists and ethno botanists. We tend to even take it a little bit
further because we have so much evidence where we look att, plants, plant
species and plant communities as having been influenced. That's like a
legacy effect from, uh, what people did centuries ago and what we see. A
landscape today reflects that, and so we take wee wee verily in many areas
in the southwest, Ear's on, including Grand Canyon. Even bring up the word
natural landscape. We call it a bio cultural landscape. So it takes takes
care that you know that very, very tight in connection with the people on
their on the activities of Soe long ago to president and and the landscape.
We see. But thank you very much. Thank you. And then I would have to say
that we have no geologist. We hold ethnobotany is sort of like the bar
that we'd like to aspire to someday as faras how much you've been able to
accomplish. And I didn't really have a chance to talk too much about the
specific at the geological cultural elements that go into some of this
teaching by another hour. I could do that as well, but But that is part of
it. We are very interested. We do work with traditional knowledge keepers.
Inappropriate, culturally appropriate ways to integrate that those sorts
of now starting with things as simple as place names. Okay, what are the
original place names? Not the ones that have been imposed later by people
who came later. But what of the one of the off original place names we use
? Those one of them? I wanted to ask if your team is considering, uh,
augmented reality. So at the risk of having people will walk around the
candidate Ram, looking at their phones and falling off,
you know, and also the risk of just looking at their phones, which they're
already doing, but the opportunity for learning for staying longer, for
possibly getting some amount of enrichment or education that surpasses the
experience of fifteen minutes at the end. Take a selfie back to my car.
The short answer for that is we are not. However, there is a woman by the
name of Natalie Burstyn, who used to be at the Cal State Fullerton. She's
now teaching at a university in British Columbia. She created an augmented
reality field trip to Grand Canyon. Okay, which is what basically they She
was at Utah State University and they did the trip like out on the
football field. And so they would have their phones and they were
essentially hiking through Grand Canyon on the football field. So, yes, I
mean, like the Pokemon go kind of model for for instruction. We definitely
think that's a great idea. We're not doing it, but But I would look up,
Natalie burst in, and her name is really difficult to spell. But But Jessa
, the Geological Society of America uh, monthly journal, Jessa today about
about a year and a half ago had a cover story about her, eh, Our field
trip. So, yes, I fully agree that that's that's very useful. Is there an
existence or do you have plans to develop curricular targeted, different
great groups of crosswalk with curriculum objectives and things like that
that would be applied in the classroom? We're starting to work on that for
Grand Canyon. We actually have for other. Resource is okay. If you go to
that v FT site, they're about twenty five different virtual field trips,
and one was called Red Rocks and actually starts it Sedona and ends up in
Mars and talks about what makes rocks red right. Talks about how the red
planet got red. But it starts in Sedona with, you know, with the red rocks
there. So and that one is actually oriented toward high school in middle
school, Uh, but also has undergraduates. So the answer is yes, we're
working on that. We have a program that s you called the Center for
Exploration. Educated to exploration or X, which is working on that. I had
the website earlier. Just tx dot issue. But if you go to the V f t site,
it's there. The red rocks is there
I know I'm keeping you away from your coffee.
Yes, sir. Please stand unusual comment. Have you created any virtual drips
going through the rapids? Yeah, I would, actually. If I had more time, I
was going to show We did have one video of going through. I think we have
one through hands, and we have one through father up in the river, like so
Creek or something like that. Um, but Hans is kind of fun. Yeah, they're
in there. There are There are rapids videos embedded in there. We tried to
do one through lava, but it got, like, totally so just kind of think that
I don't think it worked. But but half I think hands turned out really well.
Which is You know, that, Steph. Handsome, fun rapping. My favorite is
this hermit We didn't do one in Hermit. Should done, Herman.
Of course.
Close your eyes if you don't want to see it.
All right,
let me. Yeah. I mean, if you want to do well, maybe we should do quite. I
mean, you want to do it now, or you want to do it during the break or just
don't know it was, you know? Okay, let's do it. Knock it out. I was just
going to ask. Is the rapids more fun at the beginning of your trips or the
end of the trips?
Let's see. Where's your had the the link here, Zehra.
Okay, So here's the Here's the actual VF t page, okay? And you could see
all the different trips that are available, right? So dinosaur doom is
kind of fun. Red rocks, early civilizations. But then you go to Grand
Canyon, here's Grand Canyon,
and then you click on that and you open up the page. Do we have sound on
here? Because one of them does have sound.
Okay?
Wow.
No, Actually, there's there's actually a soundtrack for Oh, no. Come on.
What the heck?
Let me try that again. That that can't be.
Yes. Close that window. Let's try it again. I had it a moment ago. Yeah.
All right. I have no idea why this is happening.
Okay, so I don't see chrome on here. This chrome must be somewhere. Well,
there it is. Okay, let's try chrome. It should work with all browsers, all
tools. And if this works Google, we hope you're watching. And you should
have sponsored this event.
Let's try again.
Here we go.
Yeah. There we go. Okay. Let's see. Here's one of them.
It's got great sound. I just don't have I don't think we have.
No, no, no. Now
there's yours truly there.
Scratching his nose.
Here we go. This is down near the UN car Delta.
No, it's not that we didn't do three sixty through the rapids because the
instrument was too too sensitive. So we just did regular gopro for this.
Here we go. This is okay. It's not a huge rapper that I'LL look for hands
next. Hance was better.
There, Yeah.
Oh, here's Hance. Here's hands. There's the There's the. That's the That's
the famous igneous enhance their That's graced the pages of a million
textbooks that were passing one on the right there. This thing is in every
geology textbook. So this is one of the bigger rapids on the river. This
hands rapid. No, this isn't. Wait a minute. This is in the basement. So
this is a different one side.
But it's like this is a bigger This might be Krystal. Anybody know which
one is it? Is it Is it Sock dollar? Okay, Sock da llegar.
That wasn't hand stance was on there somewhere.
But getting dizzy.
We had a good boatman.
Here's hands, there's hands.
Not really in order here, but
Here we go.
Well,
that was a private phone.
Twenty thirteen.
So we had to go pro tied to one of the water containers. I think that we
did it so you could see the screw. The lens is getting wet.
I think part of what happens is as you go down the river, you start moving
farther forward in the boat, you get a little bit more more courageous.
Time goes on. So anyway, so you have itso