Bridging strategies for VR-based learning
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The Round Earth Project: Deep Learning in a Collaborative Virtual World
VR '99 Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality
ScienceSpace: virtual realities for learning complex and abstract scientific concepts
VRAIS '96 Proceedings of the 1996 Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS 96)
Learning and Building Together in an Immersive Virtual World
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
Virtual reality for education?
VRST '00 Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology
Social interactions in multiscale CVEs
Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Collaborative virtual environments
Distance Learning Classroom Using Virtual Harlem
VSMM '01 Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM'01)
Situational learning in real and virtual space: lessons learned and future directions
ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Educators program
Software Agent in Desktop Virtual Shopping
WI-IAT '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 03
Educational virtual environments: A ten-year review of empirical research (1999-2009)
Computers & Education
Interactive storytelling with virtual identities
EGVE'01 Proceedings of the 7th Eurographics conference on Virtual Environments & 5th Immersive Projection Technology
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The concept of a round Earth is not 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, while holding tight to the features of those prior models, thereby inhibiting fundamental conceptual change.The Round Earth Project is a collaboration among researchers in computer science, education and psychology investigating 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 evidencing a breakdown in the children's prior models. The alternative 'selectionist' strategy, in contrast, attempts to effect learning in an alternative setting (in our case, a small diameter asteroid), free of pre-existing biases, and to relate that learning back to the target domain: the Earth.Virtual reality (VR) technologies are used to support both pedagogical strategies. In the transformationalist approach, VR is used to simulate the launching of a spacecraft from the Earth's surface and subsequent exploration within a fixed-height orbit. In the selectionist approach, VR is used to simulate a small diameter asteroid upon which the learner may walk on a body with a curved horizon, see objects 'appear' from 'below' the horizon, take a long walk around the entire globe and come back to where they started. In both environments, distributed VR technologies are used to provide a collaborative learning environment promoting positive interdependence among pairs of learners. While initial pilot studies were performed by bringing children to the VR equipment in the laboratory, the actual studies are being run by bringing the VR equipment into a local elementary school as part of an ongoing research program looking at the use of VR in conceptual learning for children.