Instructional Materials for Teaching Science through Virtual Environments

North Dakota State University Fargo, Fargo ND

Investigators

Abstract

The North Dakota State University World Wide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC) is funded to develop two multiuser, interactive virtual environments (IVEs) -- the "Geology Explorer" (where students land on a foreign planet to identify rocks and minerals, and build models of geologic structure), and "On-a-Slant" (a virtual reconstruction of a Native American earth lodge village that students explore while learning archeology and anthropology). The former has been used in college level courses and will be adapted to secondary schools; the latter is a new environment under development for the same level. IVEs have been rigorously studied with college level students and the results indicate that IVE students perform higher on various assessments than those exposed to a more traditional instructional approach. The project has three explicit goals. They are to alter or construct the IVEs to be age-appropriate for 6-12 grade level students by increasing scaffolding and intelligent software tutor capabilities and providing embedded assessment tools; to design standards-based curricula supplementing for both IVEs for middle school and high school classrooms; and to develop a series of online workshops designed to train secondary teachers on the IVE software, familiarize them with the curriculum materials and provide a forum for the exchange of ideas for additional lesson plans and/or software adaptations.