This paper describes the design, evaluation, and lessons learned from a project involving the implementation of an immersive virtual environment for children called NICE (Narrative-based, Immersive, Constructionist/Collaborative Environments). The goal of the NICE project was to construct a testbed for the exploration of virtual reality as a learning medium within the context of the primary educational reform themes of the past three decades. With a focus on informal education and domains with social content, NICE embraces the constructivist approach to learning, collaboration, and narrative development, and is designed to utilize the strengths of virtual reality: a combination of immersion, telepresence, immediate visual feedback, and interactivity. Based on our experiences with a broad range of users, the paper discusses both the successes and limitations of NICE and concludes with recommendations for research directions in the application of immersive VR technologies to children's learning.
This paper describes the NICE project, an immersive learning environment for children implemented in the CAVE and related multi-user virtual reality VR technologies. The NICE project provides an engaging setting where children construct and cultivate simple virtual ecosystems, collaborate via networks with other remotelylocated children, and create stories from their interactions in the real and virtual world.
T he concept of a round Earth isn't a simple one for children to acquire. Their everyday experience reinforces their deeply held notion that the Earth is flat. Told by adults that the Earth is round, they often react by constructing a mental model of the Earth as a pancake, or a terrarium-like structure with people living on the flat dirt layer inside, or even a dual model with a spherical Earth and a flat Earth coexisting simultaneously. In effect, children attempt to accommodate the new knowledge within the framework of their existing conceptual models. Unfortunately, holding tight to the features of those prior models inhibits fundamental conceptual change. The Round Earth Project is a collaboration among researchers in computer science, education, and psychology. It investigates two alternative pedagogical strategies for teaching children that the Earth is spherical and the implications of that fact. One strategy, which we term the transformationalist approach, attempts to effect conceptual change by breaking down the children's prior models. In contrast, the selectionist strategy attempts to effect learning in an alternative setting (in our case, a small-diameter asteroid), free of preexisting biases, and to relate that learning back to the target domain-the Earth. Virtual reality (VR) technologies support both pedagogical strategies. In the transformationalist approach, VR simulates the launching of a spacecraft from the Earth's surface and subsequent exploration within a fixed-height orbit. In the selectionist approach, VR simulates a small-diameter asteroid. Thus learners may walk on a body with a curved horizon, see objects appear from below the horizon, take a long walk around
In a single-subject study of a software developer working in an object-oriented programming environment, we found evidence of a development style characterized by pervasive software reuse. The subject employed regular strategies for template selection and coding in her work, and avoided techniques requiring deep understanding of code details or symbolic execution whenever possible. Within the limits of the design of the study, the subject's performance is related to attributes of object-oriented programming and our interpretation of the mature mental model with which she approached her task.
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