HERBARIUM VIRTUAL FIELD TRIP

Collaborator: Eugene Tang, with consultation from Dawn Neisser at the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve

Our objective is to share with Stanford students who are interested in nature, what a herbarium is and the importance of the work. Students can explore the 360 herbarium space with interactive media such as: videos of the collecting process, pictures of plants, and brief history of herbariums. We did needfinding with students, produced multimedia assets, used the Pano2VR software, and tested iterations of the prototype while consulting with herbarium docents throughout.

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I led the logistics, budget handling, and design of this virtual field trip, focusing on the educational aspects and assessment of learning. From initial surveys, students showed an increase in herbarium knowledge and agreed that the virtual field trip helped them enjoy the subject matter better. 

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An interactive virtual field trip to this extent for herbariums has not been done before; I hope this methodology can be shared with other collections that want increase outreach and accessibility to the public.