Title: Building Blocks for Virtual Worlds: Design Principles for a Starter Kit for Educational Virtual Worlds
PI: Katy Borner, Indiana University
Other collaborating institutions: Cornell University; University of California, Santa Cruz
Growing interest in the use of online multi-user virtual environments, virtual worlds (VWs), for educational outreach and online learning has motivated the establishment of a community of educators, designers, software developers, and students, VLearn3D.org. This international and interdisciplinary group focuses on sharing information and ideas about the implementation of 3D graphical multi-user environments, most emerging from commercial gaming and chat room developers, for educational use.
Over the past two years, a large number of educators have invested time, energy, and money to create worlds in the educational universe of Activeworlds, AWEDU. Activeworlds Corp. has made supporting this use of their technology a priority, however, they need input from an informed user community. More than 150 educational worlds have been attempted in the AWEDU universe. Of those, more than 70 remain active projects. At least 40 institutions, ranging from rural middle schools and home-schooling programs to architectural design programs, are currently designing and building content. Approximately one half of this group focuses on K-12 education. Many have had a difficult time beginning their projects and most report a steep initial learning curve with the technology. If the K-12 community is to grow beyond the fearless pioneers, we need to provide them with a flexible set of beginning tools and guidelines and we are now poised to determine what they should be.
In this project, we will compile recommendations for a "basic starter kit" for educators who are interested in exploring this new medium. In addition, we will propose a standard set of design features for educational worlds to Activeworlds.com, who has requested our input. This work will extend beyond just one technology, by incorporating input from the VLearn3D community and related research groups. It is meant to serve as a reference and benchmark for future research and development in the area of exploring multimedia 3-D virtual world gaming technology or Adobe Atmosphere worlds for educational purposes. We believe that the entire VLearn3D organization, and also groups with broader interests, such as the CSCL community, will benefit from this work.
This seed grant hosted the fifth annual VLEARN3D Conference in Cyberspace on December 7, 2002.
Title: Towards Design Principles for Designing a Project-Based Inquiry Learning Environment for Middle School Science
PI: Janet Kolodner, Georgia Tech
Other collaborating institutions: Northwestern University; University of Michigan
For much of the past decade, the participants in this seed grant have been designing software and curriculum units in support of project-based inquiry for middle school science and have been piloting, field testing, and refining those units and software in an effort to make them work within the constraints of middle school classrooms and broadly across middle school contexts. Our intention in this project is to bring our groups together, and to bring together representatives from the KIE/WISE group (e.g., Betsy Davis) and from Vanderbilt (e.g., Bob Sherwood) to share what we've learned about designing such environments and to author design principles that others might use. Our design principles will pertain to, among other things, functions software should take on, integration of software into classroom activities, design of project challenges, managing learning, creating classroom culture, assessment, and systems of scaffolding. Our intention is to come together for at least one 2-day meeting, to define some of those principles, and to enter an indexed set of principles into the CILT database along with pointers to real-world examples. We will then have learning sciences students use the principles as they design educational technology in their graduate classes, get feedback about their usefulness and usability, and refine the principles.
Title: Identifying Emergent Design Principles through Analysis of Learning Technology in Action
PI: Jody Underwood, Educational Testing Service
Other collaborating institutions: SRI International; North Carolina State University; University of Colorado, Boulder
The project's objectives are to identify principles that can guide the design of effective learning technologies through the analysis of applets created by the Educational Software Components of Tomorrow (ESCOT, NSF-funded) project. In this 3-year project, applets and associated activities were created by teams of teachers, educational technologists, and software developers. The activities were published on the Math Forum website and were used by hundreds of middle school students over the course of two years.
This work will contribute to the CILT Design Principle database by adding design principles based on 40 concrete cases. We are hoping that with so many applets being analyzed against student data that a number of lessons can be learned about the design of powerful educational technologies. We intend to share our findings with the learning sciences community and other relevant communities.
In addition to providing software developers with information about educational software design principles, we will also think about how practitioners will be able to use the information in the design principles database. For example, we think that indexing the design principles on learning goals (proficiencies) will help teachers evaluate software that will help their students learn.