Virtual environments in biology teaching

Students’ Attitudes Toward Computer Use in Slovakia

“…Students who use ICT achieve better results in communication, cooperation and in solving problems (Williams, 2003). Graff (2003) and Mikropoulos et al (2003) claims that ICT support the improvement of pupils' mental and creative activities. Creative use of ICT can increase creative thinking (Wheeler, 2002).…”

Virtual Reality in Biology: Can We Become Virtual Naturalists?

“…Other VMR applications were designed to give the students an immersive experience of more specific biological processes such as the cell structure [23], spatial orientation [24], and vision formation in animals [25]. Students report higher engagement and learning outcomes with immersive experiences offered by VMR applications, which is encouraging for the use of VMR in biology education [11,13,14,26,27] ( Fig 1). For example, [24] designed an immersive interactive VMR platform for visualisation and teaching of conformation and geometry of protein crystallographic structures, whereby the test group was able to identify characteristics and regions in the samples that were 4 obfuscated in non-immersive programs [24].…”

A Comparison of the Effects of Classroom and Multi-User Virtual Environments on the Perceived Speaking Anxiety of Adult Post-Secondary English Language Learners

“…Similarly, in education, MUVEs have been used for a variety of disciplines such as pre-service teacher training (Bull, Bull, & Kajder, 2004;Bronack, Riedl, & Tashner, 2005;Schlager, Fusco, & Schank, 2002), science-based activities (Kafai, 2006), biology instruction (Mikropoulos, Katsikis, Nikolou, & Tsakalis, 2003), and engaging in scientific inquiry (Clarke, Dede, Ketelhut, & Nelson, 2006). For example, using the MUVE of River City, approximately 2000 middle-school students took part in a study aimed to investigate novel pedagogies for helping teachers infuse inquiry into a science curriculum.…”