Environmental Science and Toxicology.
Environmental Detectives is designed to be used in Environmental Education Courses. Environmental Detectives would meet standards in both content areas, such as global chemical flows and transport of toxins, as well as investigative and process skills that are a core component of any environmental education or ecology curriculum. Working with MIT professor Dr. Heidi Nepf, we are also developing scenarios where Environmental Detectives could be used in toxicology and transport classes at MIT.

Flexible Platform
The flexibility of the platform editing tools allows environmental detectives to be tailored to several different age groups and content areas. In advanced courses, players might be given just symptoms which they must use to decipher what toxin may have caused the problem. Younger students could be given more hints as to what toxins might have caused the problem. The basic metaphor of the platform - a map-based system that simulates the spread of substances through an environment and then reveals to the player only the information that corresponds to the part of the environment they are in - can be also used to represent the spread of viruses or radioactive substances through an enviornment.

Copyright 2002, MIT.