ABSTRACT Much attention has been paid to what students and the general public should know about geoscience content through discipline literacy documents (cf. Geoscience Literacies, 2017), but there is little effort to teach about the identity and life of scientists, especially female geoscientists. The stereotypical view of a scientist being an older white male in a laboratory begins in the second grade, with adults viewing scientists’ personalities as robotic, potentially dangerous, and not necessarily a group that can be trusted (Rutjens and Heine, 2016). Social media can provide a platform to reach audiences that range in age, geographic location, and formal/informal settings. The use of selfies and hashtags on social networking services such as Twitter and Instagram can educate others in what scientists do and what scientists are like. Online campaigns such as #ActualLivingScientist and the Earth Science Women’s Network’s #dayofscience are examples of ways to generate conversation and build community in breaking the scientist stereotype. Whether a campaign is one month in length, as the National Science Foundation’s #NSFstories during Women’s History Month, or a year-long daily snapshot into the life of scientists during #365scienceselfies, the images and stories of female scientists become available to a global audience, especially to teen girls and young women who are more likely to use these visual social media platforms. Existing hashtags will continue and new social media campaigns will emerge with time, but to fully educate others about the lives of female geoscientists, we need to diversify our scientist participation on social media and post honest, unfiltered information about the ups and downs of being a scientist in this discipline.

As part of a course objective to improve the geographic literacy of students in higher education, Penn State's Amazing Race , a modified version of Google Earth's application programming interface (API) demo game, Geo Whiz , engages students in learning physical geography within a Google Earth browser plug-in. Students navigate around the Earth to identify on the globe the locations of various countries, major cities, United States national parks, and locations with features of geological significance. To better achieve the learning goal, several game elements were incorporated into the game interface: a timer to encourage concentration, a ranking board with scores of all players to motivate students to improve and to assess learning results, and a replay function for instructors to review students' performance and specific difficulties. Google Earth API is used to control the Earth movements and map display, while custom JavaScript code adds the function of a timer, recording/playback, and score keeping. Google Earth's browser plug-in does not provide a layer that contains political boundaries without state and country labels, so one additional feature added to The Amazing Race is Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)–published boundary data without the names of world countries and U.S. states converted to a zipped Keyhole Markup Language (KMZ) file. The framework of this game can be easily exported for application to other disciplines for various student levels and ages.