Video: Learning in a virtual world
HGSE Professor Chris Dede
CHRIS DEDE: We've designed a multi-user virtual environment, intermediate in complexity between the real world and the scripted lab that's very engaging for students, that aids them in learning complex higher order skills like hypothesis formation and collaboration, and that provides national standards content in biology, ecology, epidemiology, earth science, and history.
Kids see an interface that looks much like the games they use for entertainment. They, and a small team of their friends, go back in time to a virtual place called River City. To begin, learners become avatars, graphical representations of themselves inside of the River City virtual environment.
MAN IN VIDEO: Hello, and welcome to River City. I'm glad you could join me today for this tour.
Students can enter buildings, climb mountains and swim through virtual bodies of water. Also as they explore the city, they can click on objects that contain hyperlinks. And clicking on the objects will trigger the appearance of webpages or images, simulations, Web-based applications, all of which appear in a Web browser embedded in the software.
The River City curriculum has students work in teams to develop hypotheses about several illnesses that are sweeping the town. At the end of the project, the student teams compare their research with other teams and discover this complex web of competing and viable hypotheses about what's happening in the town.
CHRIS DEDE: Based on our results thus far, we're excited about how MUVES can provide immersive, engaging simulations that complement lectures, textbooks, labs, and fieldtrips as part of an effective science curriculum. We're also delighted that MUVES provide a means of narrowing the achievement gap among different kinds of students, helping underperforming learners to feel motivated and successful.
We see ways of generalizing MUVES for use in history and social studies, the arts and humanities. Using this interactive medium provides a powerful way of linking education in school to the communication, entertainment, and informal learning kids do outside of school with various interactive media.
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