Virtual Worlds for Education Dr. Brian M. Slator, Computer Science Department North Dakota State University

World Wide Web Instructional Committee NDSU WWWIC World Wide Web Instructional Committee Paul Juell Donald Schwert Phillip McClean Brian Slator Bernhardt Saini-Eidukat Alan White Jeff Clark WWWIC faculty supported by large teams of undergraduate and graduate students. WWWIC’s virtual worlds research supported by NSF grants DUE-9752548, EAR-9809761, DUE-9981094, ITR-0086142 and EPSCoR 99-77788

Educational Role-playing Games “Learning-by-doing” Experiences MultiUser Exploration Spatially-oriented virtual worlds Practical planning and decision making

Games have the capacity to engage! Balancing Pedagogy with Play Games have the capacity to engage! • Powerful mechanisms for instruction • Illustrate real-world content and structure • Promote strategic maturity (“learning not the law, but learning to think like a lawyer”)

The Geology Explorer

The Virtual Cell

Work in Progress

Like-A-Fishhook Time Line 1839 1845 1862 1890 1930 1950 2001

Tutors are Needed In Virtual Environments: Students can join from any remote location They can log in at any time of day or night Human tutors cannot be available at all times to help Students can become discouraged or “lost” in the world and not know why

Tutoring is Done by: Intelligent Software Tutoring Agents. (example: Diagnostic Tutors) 1. Equipment tutor 2. Exploration tutor 3. Science tutor Detects when a student makes a wrong guess and why (i.e. what evidence they are lacking); or when a student makes a correct guess with insufficient evidence (i.e. a lucky guess)

Assessment Qualitative Rejects the notion of standardized multiple choice tests Pre-game narrative-based survey • short problem-solving stories • students record their impressions and questions Similar post-game survey with different but analogous scenarios Surveys analyzed for improvement in problem-solving

Mean Post-Intervention Scenario Scores for 1998 Geology Explorer - NDSU Physical Geology Students Grader Grader Grader Group No. One Two Three Alternate 95 29.3a 27.0a 42.6a Control 195 25.1a 25.5a 44.5a Planet Oit 78 40.5b 35.4b 53.4b Within any column, any two means followed by the same letter are not significantly different at P=0.05 using Duncan’s multiple range mean separation test.