NSF Science360 News Features CyGaMEs: Picture of the Day
Date Posted: June 16, 2015
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Science360 News honored CyGaMEs Selene as the June 16, 2015 "Picture of the Day."
The Science360 caption reads:
Players of the CyGaME (Cyberlearning through Game-based, Metaphor Enhanced Learning Objects) Project instructional video game Selene, a lunar science game developed by the Center for Educational Technologies® and supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, discover and apply fundamental geological processes such as collisional accretion. Selene models the Giant Impact Theory. That the moon was formed out of debris left over from an indirect collision between Earth and an astronomical body the size of Mars, approximately 4.5 billion years ago. This still image captured from Selene illustrates a large projectile about a quarter the size of the proto-Earth colliding with early Earth. Player inquiry discovers and applies the physics through which debris from the collision accreted as the Earth's proto moon.
Dr. Debbie Denise Reese, principal investigator of the NSF-funded CyGaMEs project, provided three production-quality Selene images as part of her NSF CyGaMEs final report. NSF editors added the three image files to the NSF Multimedia Gallery Archive. Each image is available for download in the production-quality tif format.
According to the website: NSF's "Science360 is an up-to-date view of breaking science news from around the world. . . . We gather news from wherever science is happening, including directly from scientists, college and university press offices, popular and peer-reviewed journals, and dozens of National Science Foundation science and engineering centers." Content for Science 360 Picture of the Day is selected by the Science360 editor and reviewed by NSF staff.