The Impact of Three Dimensional Immersive Virtual Environments on Modern Pedagogy

我们在华盛顿大学人机接口技术实验室(HIT Lab)的研究表明，与传统的教育授课方式相比，虚拟现实等三维沉浸式虚拟环境可能能够更好地帮助学生理解复杂内容领域的概念和规则。这个项目的主要目标将是开发一个研究计划，以充分探索和测试与这些观察相关的假设。为了实现这一目标，我们建议于1997年3月在华盛顿州西雅图主办一次为期两天的会议，由12至15名内容专家、教育工作者、教育技术专家和认知科学家参加。本工作坊将侧重于复杂科学内容的教与学。在这方面，我们选择了全球变暖现象作为测试内容领域进行分析，因为它的复杂性和它与初中和高中科学课程的相关性。预期的研讨会成果包括：1)就虚拟现实(VR)教育研究的方向提出建议；2)评估沉浸式3D互动虚拟环境相对于更传统方法的优劣的关键问题和衡量标准；3)确定3D、界面和互动可能对学习产生最大影响的课程主题；4)组织一个核心的跨学科研究人员小组，他们将可以就感兴趣的研究项目提供建议并进行合作。我们计划通过已发表的报告和WWW网站来传播研讨会的结果。我们认为，我们制定的研究议程将有助于国家科学基金会(NSF)和其他政府机构帮助确定投资的优先事项，以便在课堂上部署先进技术。此外，我们预计，这次研讨会将成为研究界解决难题的催化剂，如先进虚拟接口与现有低成本替代方案的成本与效益的对比。

Our research at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) indicates that three dimensional immersive virtual environments such as virtual reality may be able to help students understand concepts and rules in complex content domains better than traditional educational delivery methods. The main goal for this project will be develop a research program to fully explore and test hypotheses associated with these observations. In order to accomplish this goal we propose to host a two-day meeting of 12 to 15 content specialists, educators, education technology specialist and cognitive scientists in Seattle, Washington, during March 1997. This workshop will focus on the teaching and learning of complex science content. In this regard, we have selected global warming phoenomenon as the test content area to analyze because of its complexity and its relevance to middle and high school science curriculum. Expected workshop results include: 1) recommendations on the direction of virtual reality (VR) research in education; 2) key questions and metrics to assess the goodness of immersive 3D interactive virtual environments relative to more traditional methods; 3) determination of the curriculum topics wherein 3D, interfaces and interactivity may have the greatest impact on learning; 4) organization of a core group of interdisciplinary researchers who will be available to advise and collaborate on research projects of interest. We plan to disseminate the results of the workshop via published reports and via a WWW site. We feel that the research agenda that we develop will be useful to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other government agencies in helping to establish priorities in vestments to deploy advanced technologies in the classroom. In addition, we anticipate that this workshop will serve as a catalyst for the research community to develop into the difficult issues such as the cost versus benefits of advanced virtual interfaces versus currently available lower-cost alternatives.