This July, 20 students from the University of West Florida collaborated with the National Park Service and Next Exit History to create a number of digital tours for Mount Rainier National Park.
The students spent the month visiting 20 national parks across the U.S. creating unique content for each site. Next Exit History is a free GPS-based mobile app developed by the UWF and Historical Research Associates, an organization based in Missoula, Montana.
The project was meant to coordinate with the 2016 Centennial celebration of the establishment of the National Park Service.
The students worked with park rangers, interpreters, wildlife experts and environmental managers and professional historians to collect content.
The information was then spun into interactive features for Next Exit History’s game “History Hunters.”
“The research conducted for this project helped me gain an understanding of the park’s history, but one does not truly comprehend the beauty and significance of such an area until experiencing it,” said Chase Oswald, a graduate student at the University of West Florida said in a press release.
Most of the information collected through the parks is still being processed, but the interactive tour for Mount Rainier National Park is live and available. It can be viewed online or the “Next Exit History” app can be downloaded for both Android and Apple systems in the Google Play or the App Store.
For more information or to view the work on Mount Rainier, visit: www.nextexithistory.com.
