Earth: A Primer is the animated textbook any child would love studying from and it seems fascinating even to adults or geology specialists. The iPad application is its very title, a primer of World’s wonders and its natural manifestations. But more than a simple opportunity to acknowledge basic scientific concepts, Earth: A Primer permits the users to act as the Gods of their own Planet, with the capacity to literally ‘’move mountains’’, or more exactly to create them from scratch, as ‘’Earth is (their) playground’’.
The motto of Earth: A Primer is simply put but it encompasses the right amount of questions in order to stir the curiosity of people, no matter their age or occupation. Auto characterizing itself as a ‘’science book for playful people’’ in its promotional video, Earth: A Primer encourages viewers from the beginning to ‘’Discover how Earth works: Look Inside. Make volcanoes. Push around tectonic plates.’’ Becoming explorers of the world, users will be offered the possibility to virtually and playfully sculpt mountains, raise sea level, paint with wind or form glaciers. The application is not only a beautifully painted image of how certain phenomena are created, as every picture is accompanied by researched and lengthy explanations.
The idea of Earth: A Primer started its development by Chaim Gingold years ago, but in initial stages, the application was thought to become a game. After working with Will Wright at the fantasy game Spore, Gingold decided to create a fantasy of his own. Around that time, Chaim also met designer Bret Victor, whose previous projects combining multimedia and text triggered Gingold the idea of creating Earth: A Primer as an interactive book. The format of Earth: A Primer is simple and effective: on one side of the screen, we have a written text and on the other, the simulation of the described phenomena. It is only after reading the ‘’instructions’’ one can play God by creating mountains and glaciers.
Initially considering his Primer an interactive game, Gingold restructured his message into an animated book, but his passion for science and the natural world remained unaltered: ‘’One of the most important experiences for me is a sense of wonder in the natural world,’’ Gingold explained. “I’ll never forget seeing Cosmos for the first time, and experiencing this sense of my own smallness and how interconnected the world I lived in was. I’ve always wanted to help other people see things that way, but I think I was doing it in the wrong genre.’’