Kinesthetic Learning of Atmospheric Dynamics

Imagine middle school students moving around a school gymnasium to learn about how a hurricane forms by collaborating to create the spatial distribution of sea-level pressure that produce the hurricane. Or imagine a college classroom with fixed seats where students represent a grid of values in a simulation and are challenged to make and interpret measurements as a simulated earthquake happens at an arbitrary location in the room.

The Wireless Indoor Location Device (WILD) Learning System being developed at the University of Michigan provides a unique platform for kinesthetic learning by allowing students to become active participants in simulations of complex systems from climate, weather, geosciences, biology, math and physics to social and behavioral interactions. This hands-on presentation invites participants assigned specific pressure values to create virtual wind fields projected on a screen based on their location in space. It is the hope of this presentation to engage participants in broader thinking about how learning weather and climate dynamics could benefit from kinesthetic activities.