Major: Enhancing Creativity and Authoring in STEM Education-Based Virtual Worlds through Concept-Oriented Design

这项研究将探索如何将概念导向设计（一种设计和开发复杂3D用户界面的方法）用于月球探索，这是一款旨在支持物理概念学习的大型多人在线游戏（MMOG）。《魔兽世界》（World of Warcraft）等mmog和《第二人生》（Second Life）等虚拟世界近年来越来越受欢迎，为数百万人提供了长达数小时的娱乐。考虑到它们的受欢迎程度，同样明显的是，如果使用得当且具有建设性，这些虚拟世界和mmog有可能显著促进科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）教育的学习。学生们可以积极地相互参与，解决反映STEM学科的有趣问题，并合作解决他们个人无法解决的更大问题。这些工具不仅提供了有趣的学习环境，而且为学习过程中的创造力提供了绝佳的机会，学生可以根据他们的知识编写游戏内的任务，并专注于STEM主题的有趣故事，教育工作者和家长可以监督和指导学习。通过编写这些任务，学生可以通过在协作环境中教授他们的同伴来有效地学习，而教师可以创建令人兴奋的场景，学生可以在课堂之外探索。在虚拟世界和mmog中支持创造力和创作的关键研究挑战是开发一套工具，使学生和教师都可以轻松地创建适合STEM教育的游戏任务，而无需软件开发和复杂的编程。面向概念的设计侧重于作者设想的行为和会话因果语言，以开发多层表示，指导作者进行最终设计，并将想法模块化为可理解、可重用的概念。这些概念在运行时执行，维护开发人员因果关系的预期顺序。除了创作工具，这项研究还使用了一个参与式设计过程来探索如何最好地创作内容，并建立开发奖励和娱乐的游戏内任务的最佳实践，同时能够实现与教学学生相关的所有利益相关者都能达成一致的预期学习目标。最后，该项目将调查以概念为导向的设计的教学意义，因为它与《月球探索》的创作内容和激发创造力有关。这项工作有可能使成千上万的中学生、高中生和大学生受益。

This research will explore how concept-oriented design - a methodology for the design and development of complex 3D user interfaces - can be utilized in Lunar Quest, a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) designed to support learning of physics concepts. MMOGs such as World of Warcraft, and virtual worlds such as Second Life, have become increasingly popular in recent years, providing hours of entertainment to millions of people. Given their popularity, it is also clear that, if used properly and constructively, these virtual worlds and MMOGs have the potential to significantly enhance learning in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. Students can actively engage each other and the world to solve interesting problems that reflect STEM disciplines and collaborate on larger problems they individually could not solve. These vehicles not only provide interesting learning environments, but also present an excellent opportunity for creativity in the learning process where students, based on their knowledge, can author in-game quests with intriguing narratives that focus on STEM topics, and educators and parents can monitor and guide learning. By authoring these quests, students can effectively learn though teaching their peers in a collaborative setting while teachers can create exciting scenarios that students can explore beyond the classroom.The key research challenge in supporting creativity and authoring in virtual worlds and MMOGs is developing a set of tools which make it easy for both student and teacher to create in game quests tailored to STEM education without the need for software development and complex programming. Concept-oriented design focuses on the author's envisioned behavior and conversational causal language, to develop a multi-tiered representation that will guide authors to their final design and modularizes ideas into understandable, reusable concepts. These concepts are executed at runtime, maintaining the intended ordering of the developer's causal relationships. In addition to authoring tools, this research also use a participatory design process to explore how best to author content and establish best practices for developing in-game quests that are rewarding and entertaining, yet are able to achieve intended learning goals that all stakeholders involved with teaching students can agree upon. Finally, the project will investigate the pedagogical implications of concept-oriented design as it relates to authoring content in Lunar Quest and sparking creativity. This work has the potential to benefit thousands of students at the middle, high school, and college levels.