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FathomVerse Resources for Educators

Updated: Sep 24


Hands hold a tablet showing an underwater image with "fathomverse" text. Blue background with a grid pattern and ocean waves.

Greetings Educators!


FathomVerse shares awe-inspiring ocean animals with casual gamers. It's a free mobile game designed to inspire a new wave of ocean explorers while improving the artificial intelligence researchers use to discover ocean life. 



On behalf of the FathomVerse team, thank you for your interest and support in this community science effort. We’re very much looking forward to partnering with classrooms, camps, and educator networks to bring ocean science to students with FathomVerse. Please find our resources for educators below and feel free to reach out with any questions!


Onwards and downwards,

FathomVerse Team


How to Make FathomVerse Work for You

Consider incorporating FathomVerse in your classroom and help advance ocean science! You can choose to use one of the existing lesson plans from our partners, or reach out to our team fathomverse@mbari.org to create a new resource that can be shared with other educators. We have additional resources (FathomVerse Dashboard, Animal Icons, Videos, and promotional materials) that can be integrated with your lesson plan as well. If you’d like to dive deeper, connect with us on social media @fathomverse and join our Discord community for all the latest updates and chances to share your feedback. Onwards and downwards!


Classroom Resources

Lesson Plans and Activities from our Partners


Additional Resources

FathomVerse players can input their unique player ID (visible on the FathomVerse settings page) to see a summary of their achievements and contributions to the FathomVerse. From the Dashboard webpage, you can click “print report” to print or save a copy. In the printable version, educators can use this information to track student progress by seeing players’: 

  1. Dive Time: Indicates your student’s total time spent identifying animals in FathomVerse. 

  2. Daily Annotations: Shows when your student played. 

  3. Your Discoveries: Allows you to see your student’s overall scientific contribution to labeling previously unlabeled data. 

    1. FathomVerse Agrees: Number of images that have reached consensus, due in part to your student’s label. 

    2. FathomVerse Disagrees: Number of images that have reached a different consensus than your student’s label. 

    3. Awaiting Consensus: Number of images that your student has labeled that haven’t reached full consensus from the community yet. 

    4. The sum of these indicates the total number of contributions your student has made to labeling expedition data.

  4. Animal Mission Score Table: Allows you to see your student’s accuracy in identifying the different animal groups (coming soon to the printable version). 


Ideas for using FathomVerse + the Player Dashboard in the classroom: 

  • Animal Morphology Lesson: 

    • Have students select an animal of interest, complete training for that animal in FathomVerse, and search for that animal group in expeditions (available after 3 training dives). 

    • Play FathomVerse (and potentially incorporate other resources) to learn how to identify their chosen animal group. Students can report on how they distinguished the animal from other groups. 

    • Educators can use the Dashboard to see the student’s accuracy in identifying that animal group as well as the dives completed with that animal. 

  • Extra Credit Points: 

    • Play FathomVerse to earn extra credit points! Educators can verify their student’s contribution by looking at the daily annotations graph on the Dashboard printout. 

    • Check your student’s discoveries to see their direct contributions to ocean discovery–every time “FathomVerse agrees” your student has made data available for scientific study!

  • Volunteer Hours

    • Play FathomVerse to participate in community science. Every action taken by FathomVerse players helps to improve and train machine learning models, increasing our annotated global datasets to discover all ocean life. “Dive time” on the player dashboard reflects spent identifying animals in FathomVerse.


Ocean Animal Icons

Silhouette Images Contributed by MBARI and FathomVerse to PhyloPic – Our original animal icons are open-source! Visit: https://www.phylopic.org/contributors/d28d59e4-3e86-4236-9d19-8ce9223dfe9f/mbari-and-fathomverse-silhouettes


Videos


Promotional Materials


About FathomVerse

Description

Dive into a cozy, ocean community science game! 

FathomVerse shares awe-inspiring ocean animals with casual gamers. It's a mobile game designed to inspire a new wave of ocean explorers while improving the artificial intelligence researchers use for the discovery of ocean life.


Background

FathomVerse seeks to transform ocean exploration by engaging a community of passionate ocean enthusiasts to work alongside researchers. Scientists estimate that anywhere from 30-60% of life in the ocean is still unknown to science. Filling that knowledge gap is vital if we want to understand how all ocean ecosystems are being impacted by climate change. With advances in imaging and AI technology, we can capture images of the ocean and quickly analyze them. However, AI needs people to continuously train and verify the models. That's where FathomVerse comes in. 


The FathomNet teamed up with game design experts, including &ranj Serious Games and Internet of Elephants, to develop a unique mobile game that allows anyone with a smartphone or tablet to participate in ocean exploration and assist the whole ocean community in the quest to understand marine ecosystems. Every action taken by FathomVerse players in the game helps to improve and train machine learning models, massively increasing our annotation efforts. 


By tapping into our collective curiosity, FathomVerse seeks to transform ocean exploration by engaging a community of passionate ocean enthusiasts to work alongside researchers.


What is FathomVerse?

FathomVerse is a free mobile game available on the App Store and Google Play. The game offers an interactive community science experience where players can engage with real ocean images collected by researchers and robots from around the world. By playing the game, players improve the AI that is being used to discover ocean life. 


Where do the images in FathomVerse come from?

The images you see in FathomVerse are real photos collected by ocean researchers. Scientists, coastal communities, government agencies, and enthusiasts all over the world are deploying all kinds of imaging systems to monitor and explore the depths of the ocean. Every dive in FathomVerse is filled with imagery that researchers have shared with us. 


To set up a dive, first, we add images that have been verified by experts. These are known as labeled images. Then we add images that have not been seen or verified yet. These are known as unlabeled images. 


With a mix of labeled and unlabeled images, FathomVerse creates different combinations for each dive that you play based on your progress and the missions you select. 


Who is making FathomVerse? 

FathomVerse is a collaborative, multi-institutional project led by FathomNet and MBARI Principal Engineer Kakani Katija. To develop FathomVerse, our team collaborated with game design experts &ranj Serious Games—a Netherlands-based game development studio focused on positive behavioral change through play—and Internet of Elephants—a nature tech enterprise based in Kenya focused on rekindling relationships between people and wildlife. Funding for FathomVerse came from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Schmidt Marine Technology Partners, a program of the Schmidt Family Foundation.


See acknowledgments for a full list of contributors.  Visit our website fathomverse.game to learn more.



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