SBIR Phase I: A Virtual-World Game for Augmenting the Classroom with Interdisciplinary, Collaborative STEM Learning

该项目将开发一个沉浸式的动态多人游戏，以解决提供引人入胜的技术的迫切需求，使学生能够应用协作，跨学科的科学实践来应对全球社会挑战。在一个与现实生活中的同龄人一起的增强教室里，学生们必须在火星上建立一个能够容纳数千名来自地球的难民的殖民地。为了成功地实现他们的目标，学生们必须使用在火星上发现的原材料来生产维持生命和建筑所必需的成分，如食物、水、氧气和燃料。在这几周的模拟课堂中，学生们将运用跨学科的STEM知识和实践来体验个人和集体行动如何产生短期和长期影响。游戏和配套课程将涉及《下一代科学标准》的内容，并最终帮助青少年理解整合科学和工程的必要性，以解决诸如清洁能源的生产、疾病的识别和治疗、充足的食物和水的分配以及全球环境变化等关键问题（NRC, 2011）。制作更接近AAA级游戏的教育类游戏，为吸引不同性别和代表性不足的年轻人进入stem相关领域提供了机会。这个项目吗?的目标是创建“虚拟实地考察”，增强教室并与之同步运行，在高度参与的社交环境中提供应用程序和体验式学习。它将以以前的专有技术为基础，使在线交互、复杂的分布式模拟和共享虚拟世界中的数据收集成为可能。这使得项目在初始阶段不仅可以专注于为学生开发高质量的游戏，还可以设计和测试高风险的课堂整合方法。这个游戏包括老师，并建议改变叙事弧线的行动，为学生提供关键知识，或增加或限制学生可用的其他物质资源。教师将能够利用收集到的学生游戏数据，将小型、动态的学生分组与高影响力的迷你课程配对，从而使该项目能够积极支持教师实施个性化、数据驱动的教学。通过包括一个教师友好的评估工具包，该项目可以在满足地区当前需求的同时，在课堂上试验未来的教育游戏。第一阶段的研究将侧重于可用性和对学生学习的影响，并试图了解教师接受和使用教师支持功能的意愿。

This project will develop an immersive and dynamic multi-player game that addresses a pressing need to provide engaging technologies that prepare students to apply collaborative, cross-disciplinary scientific practices to global societal challenges. In an augmented classroom with their real life peers, students must establish a colony on Mars that is capable of sustaining thousands of refugees from Earth. To successfully achieve their goal, students must use raw materials found on Mars to produce components necessary for life support and building, such as food, water, oxygen, and fuel. In the weeks that this simulation runs alongside their real classroom, students will apply cross-disciplinary STEM knowledge and practices to experience how both individual and collective actions have short- and long-term effects. The game and supporting curriculum will address content from the Next Generation Science Standards and ultimately help adolescent youth understand the need for the integration of science and engineering to tackle critical issues such as the production of clean energy, identification and treatment of disease, the allocation of adequate food and water, and global environmental change (NRC, 2011). Creating educational games that more closely mirror their AAA counterparts provides an opportunity to draw diverse genders and underrepresented youth into STEM-related fields.This project?' goal is to create "virtual field trips" that augment a classroom and run simultaneous to it, providing applications and experiential learning in a highly engaging social environment. It will build upon previous proprietary technology that enables simultaneous online interactions, complex distributed simulations, and data gathering in shared virtual worlds. This allows the project in its initial phase to focus not only on developing a quality game for students but also on designing and testing high-risk approaches to classroom integration. This game includes the teacher and suggests actions that alter narrative arcs, provide students with key knowledge, or increase or constrain other material resources students have available. Teachers will be able to leverage data collected on student game play to pair small, dynamic groupings of students with high impact mini-lessons to allow the project to actively support teachers as they implement personalized, data-driven instruction. By including a teacher-friendly assessment toolkit, the project can operate within districts' current requirements while experimenting with the future of educational gaming in the classroom. Phase I research will focus on usability and impact on student learning, as well as attempt to understand how willing teachers are to accept and use the teacher support features.