NASA and Gowalla Team Up to Explore the Moon

Gowalla is an incredibly clever location-based social app, available on the Android, Blackberry, and iOS platforms. As you travel around and check in at different locations, you earn virtual pins and badges-and sometimes those virtual rewards translate into actual prizes. On my higher education site this week, Julie Meloni explained how, compared to services like Foursquare, Gowalla is particularly good at making learning vivid, offering examples of different historical and cultural sites that have created strong Gowalla presences, or whose visitors created one for them.

Yesterday, Gowalla announced a new partnership that will be especially interesting to GeekDad readers: NASA:

NASA has teamed up with Gowalla to create some fun new ways to go discover more about space exploration and NASA trips to the moon! The United States successfully brought lunar samples back to Earth during the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 missions, and starting today [10/14], you can find moon rock items by checking in to any location where a real one is on display. You’ll also be able to find the NASA patch, spacesuit and space shuttles by checking in to NASA visitor centers, agency-related locations, or one of the more than 400 museums, science centers, planetariums, observatories, parks, nature centers, zoos and aquariums that are part of NASA’s Museum Alliance.

Collect three NASA items and you get the NASA pin, and the first 100 people to get the pin, get the a special edition of the poster pictured above.

For more information, follow astronaut Mike Massimino or NASA on Gowalla, and find out more about NASA's Museum Alliance, and where they display the moon rocks.

Get out there and show your kids some chunks of the moon!

(H/t to Julie Meloni.)