I-Corps: Interactive Tutoring for Virtualized STEM Labs

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to provide educational developers, who may not be familiar with psychological and pedagogical theories, a design framework to help forge a new way of designing learning activities that will engage students and help them to accelerate and solidify their understanding of Science Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) concepts being taught in lab setting. The anticipated improvement of STEM education will be particularly beneficial to learners of disparate backgrounds who are traditionally less likely to pursue STEM degrees and for those who face learning challenges traditionally viewed as disabilities. Success will mean institutions and departments of learning, both academic and corporate, will engage in more efficient ways of instilling knowledge and engendering skills to achieve a better trained and more inclusive STEM work force. This I-Corps project will further develop a framework for the creation of effective educational software running in a three dimensional Virtual Learning Environment. A set of design heuristics has been created that combine existing usability heuristics for general software design, educational software design, and software designed for virtual spaces, along with principles of human learning and memory taken from cognitive science. The applications developed using this framework are Learning Machines that are deployed into a(three dimensional Virtual Learning Space. The effectiveness of these applications are maximized through controlled implementation of evidence based principles of learning and memory during application design and user testing. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.