Birds fly off the screen to teach ecology.

Byline: LISA PICKOFF-WHITE

WASHINGTON, June 14 (UPI) -- A University of California researcher is developing an educational video game whose characters literally jump off one screen and onto a computer "raft" to teach children about ecosystem recovery.

The Virtual Raft Project, as it is called by founder Bill Tomlinson, an assistant professor of informatics and drama at U.C. Irvine, employs three desktop computers around a room, each displaying an island on its monitor representing an ecosystem. One of the islands is a preserve, and the other two can be destroyed when children hit a button and everything turns gray. The children then can repopulate the destroyed islands with the help of a park ranger by "transporting" plants and hummingbirds physically from the preserve with a tablet PC to the destroyed islands.

Tomlinson said he hopes that by being able to move the virtual organisms and physically engage with them, the children will become more interested in the subject of conservation.

"We want to teach people that the destruction of an ecosystem is easy, but reconstruction is not impossible," Tomlinson told United Press International. "It's a very powerful educational tool because people feel like they are really interacting with the system."