BioInteractive EarthViewer

This is one of the best and most comprehensive apps that we have seen so far on the topics of Earth Geography and History. We absolutely loved it. The fact that it is free is testament to a group of people who are innate disseminators of knowledge and learning. The data has been based from primary data research from academic institutions and research in Science journals. Furthermore, the app has been compiled by the academics at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US.

The app is extremely comprehensive and includes all the information required to browse, self-teach or teach a larger class-room. The graphics of the app are very slick and the app is incredibly easy to navigate.

There is a 3-D image of Earth that you can swerve and zoom in and out from in order to look closely into the land formations and the natural structures of countries. On the left-hand side of the app, we can see a time-line that is split into Eons, Eras, and Scientific Periods. Each distribution of time is carefully explained and defined in terms of the types of animals and plants that existed during the time. The user can move a bar to flit through the time periods and see how the different time-frames are portrayed on the side with the “Earth view”.  It is almost as if you can travel through time as you work through the app!

We particularly liked looking through the interactive charts and data on temperature, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, biodiversity, day length and luminosity over time.  The data is particularly interesting to look at when you compare two sets of data and attempt to identify whether there might be correlation between two phenomena. This would be something that you could do with your classroom too.

The app also chronicles geological and biological events, mass extinctions, fossils and impact events. This is also interesting to match with the data so that your students can identify how the primary research data corroborates with the descriptions on the left-hand side.

For those studying Physical Geography, the “In Depth” section is particularly useful as it explains concepts such as the Greenhouse Effect, Plate Tectonics, and Geological Carbon Cycles amongst others.

This is an amazing reference guide to the creation and development o life on Earth as we know it. We thoroughly enjoyed working through it and we think that students will be completely engrossed in reading and finding out about our Earth systems.

You can download BioInteractive EarthViewer on your Android devices from the Google Play Store.