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

2. 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 , EAR , DUE , ITR and EPSCoR

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

4. 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”)

5. The Geology Explorer

6. The Virtual Cell

7. Work in Progress

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

9. 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

10. 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)

11. 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

12. Mean Post-Intervention Scenario Scores for 1998 Geology Explorer - NDSU Physical Geology Students
Grader Grader Grader
Group No. One Two Three
Alternate a 27.0a 42.6a
Control a 25.5a 44.5a
Planet Oit b 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.