Building Bridges for Place-Bound Students: A Virtual Classroom
Description of Research
Introduction and Rationale
The Office of the Superintendent of Public
Instruction is mandated to educate all children, including the
ones who are unable to attend school due to treatments for chronic
illnesses. Children hospitalized for the treatment of chronic
illnesses, such as cancer and hemophilia, are at risk for educational
failure due to intermittent school attendance -- they may be out
of school for as much as a year at a time. This absence from
opportunities to learn and from interactions with other children
typically leads to poor self-esteem and to adjustment problems
when they return to school. Also, functional disabilities related
to the illness or its treatment and the self-consciousness of
sick children when interacting with peers make normal school activities
difficult at best.
Children's Hospital in Seattle, a major
pediatric health care facility, serves to minimize these risks
by providing educational programs for hospitalized children through
its Education Department. Staff serve on average 600 children
per year. While these programs succeed in many ways, the current
standard for providing hospital-based educational assistance as
suggested by state guidelines limits educational opportunities
to students with chronic illness and constrains optimal learning.
To overcome some of these limitations, we
propose to build a "Virtual Classroom" in which children
hospitalized for long periods use virtual reality (VR) technology
to share learning experiences with children in a public school
classroom. Through the use of helmets that present stereo graphics
and sounds, VR technology allows "participants" to enter
and interact with virtual environments (VEs) in which they are
entirely immersed. Our prior research have shown that individual
participants can learn through immersive VEs.
This proposal requests funding to provide
proof of concept that a multiple participant Virtual Classroom
is a feasible and useful way for place-bound children to continue
their education with other children. In collaboration with Children's
Hospital in Seattle and the College of Education, researchers
at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HITL) will develop
a small-scale demonstration of the Virtual Classroom and will
use it to solicit funds for the development of a large-scale multiple-site
project.
Review of Literature
Virtual reality technology allows the creation
of virtual environments in which children learn by interacting
with objects in ways that may not be possible in the real world.
For example, they can assemble atoms by hand from subatomic particles
(Byrne, Furness & Winn, 1995), directly manipulate the forces
of nature in a virtual physics laboratory (Dede, Loftin et al.,
1994) or learn Japanese prepositions by moving virtual boxes into
different configurations as the computer speaks to them in Japanese
(Rose & Billinghurst, 1995). Additionally, a VE may be visited
by more than one student at a time. These "participants"
may be in the same room using the same computer, in the same city,
or anywhere in the world (Mandeville et al., 1995).
Over the last four years, HITL and the College
of Education have collaborated to study ways that VEs can be successfully
used in public school classrooms. Last year nearly 3,000 Washington
state children in 70 schools experienced VEs, and 365 of them
built their own immersive environments. Research results have
been reported in a number of publications (Bricken & Byrne,
1994; Byrne, 1993; Osberg, 1993; Winn, 1995; Winn, Hoffman &
Osberg, 1995). This research has shown that students are capable
of learning curriculum content by interacting with objects in
VEs and that they learn more in interactive environments than
in non-interactive ones. Also, results indicate that learning
in an immersive VE leads to better conceptual understanding of
the subject (as compared to recall of facts) than learning in
other ways (Byrne, 1996). Hence, we have concluded that VR offers
new ways to learn that may help students who do not learn well
in traditional ways.
Our research on VR's educational applications
has been based on data from individuals working alone in VEs.
Yet we know that students learn certain concepts best when they
collaborate with others. For its Greenspace project, HITL developed
software that allowed two participants in Seattle to share a VE
with two participants in Tokyo (Mandeville et al., 1995). This
approach has not been used to bring students in different locations
into the same VE in order to learn together. We propose to apply
our expertise in distributed VEs to develop a shared, virtual
learning environment that allows place-bound students in Children's
Hospital to work with children in a regular Seattle classroom.
The proposed project leverages our existing experience and takes
our research on VR's educational applications in a new and exciting
direction.
Finally, we wish to note that this project
differs from the recently-publicized work of the Starbright Foundation
in two fundamental ways. First, we are focused on education;
Starbright is focused on entertainment. Our expertise in helping
children learn and instructional design for VEs is unique. Second,
our project will construct an immersive VE, and use dedicated
computers that will shares these VEs over the Internet. Starbright's
work provides non-immersive experiences over the Internet.
Objectives
The objectives of this project are as follows:
- To determine whether students in Children's
Hospital can learn the concepts and principles of complex subject
matter, appropriate to their age, by working in a VE with children
from a regular Seattle classroom. The topic will be global warming.
Given the small population from which place-bound students will
be selected, it is not possible at this time to conduct an experimental
study that compares the effectiveness of VR with "traditional"
teaching.
- To develop a software environment that
allows real-time collaboration of students from two different
sites in a VE supported by two Division Inc. Provision 100 computers.
These are mid-power, mid-cost, portable machines that HITL has
acquired and used in its educational projects to date.
- To assess the potential emotional and
psychological benefits to the participants.
- To identify logistical and technical
factors likely to affect the success of using the Virtual Classroom
in other settings.
- To use the system and the data it provides
as proof of concept in soliciting funding for a significantly
more extensive project.
Procedure
This project requires three types of activity:
Development, implementation and assessment.
Development
The project's greatest effort will go into
interface design (especially for the place-bound children) and
software development. We will need to develop a multi-participant
VE for global warming that will operate satisfactorily over the
target network.
- A VE that embodies concepts and principles
from which students may learn about global warming is being built
with funding for another project. However, this world is designed
for participants at single sites. The global warming VE needs
to be re-designed and rebuilt for use by multiple participants
over a network. This requires additional design and software
to insure that the environment will operate satisfactorily with
multiple participants over the target network. An important feature
of the world will be the use of "avatars" for the participants.
These are virtual representations of the real participants which
may, or may not, bear a resemblance to the participants themselves.
- HITL's version of multi-participant
VR employs a copy of the shared VE and the operating environment
running on a VE workstation at each site. All that is transmitted
in real time is information about how the VE should be updated
as a result of the actions of each participant locally. This
approach reduces the need to transmit large amounts of data over
the network. However, considerable experience and expertise is
required in the design and implementation of these environments
to create a useful and believable experience.
This requires the development of programs
that reside on two VE workstations, one at Children's Hospital
and another in a Seattle classroom, and the development of the
network interaction protocols. We estimate that this software
development effort will require 3.0 person-months over the year.
Also, if we can acquire a third machine
from Division Inc., we plan to add a teacher as a third participant
at the school site. Division is a member of HITL's Virtual Worlds
Consortium and will be asked to loan us a machine for the duration
of the project if it is approved. We will also be submitting
a grant to the Seattle Foundation for an additional system. We
estimate that this effort to incorporate the teacher and additional
interaction protocols will require an additional 2.0 person-months
over the year.
Implementation
Six patients from Children's Hospital will
be selected by hospital personnel to take part in the project.
Criteria for selection will be: Sufficient mobility and strength
to wear a VR helmet and use an input device, such as a wand; Mastery
of prerequisite science concepts and principles to learn about
global warming from the VE; Parental permission to participate.
A classroom of between 20 and 30 students
will be selected from one of the Seattle schools already participating
in HITL's education research. A class will be selected that is
studying global warming (or a related topic). Students will take
turns working in the VE in collaboration with the students from
Children's Hospital.
Each pair of students will engage in three
activities:
- They will "visit" various
places on earth at various times in the past and future to collaborate
in making observations of factors related to global warming, such
as temperature, sea level and quantities of greenhouse gases.
From these observations, they will construct hypotheses about
the causes and effects of global warming.
- They will revisit the VE and conduct
experiments to test their hypotheses. For example, they might
reduce the number of cars or factories burning fossil fuels, or
start reforestation projects, and measure the results of their
actions over time. (Note that instantaneous travel in time and
space is possible in a VE). On the basis of this research they
will design strategies for reducing global warming.
- On their third visit to the VE, they
will implement their strategies and observe the results.
Assessment
We propose to assess the project's success
in a number of ways: Learning outcomes, motivation, collaboration,
"presence", and technical.
- Learning. The extent to which the students
learn about global warming will be assessed by observing their
success at constructing hypotheses from data and selecting and
implementing strategies. Given the limited number of students
involved, we propose to develop a number of cases in which we
describe the behavior and achievement of individuals and groups
of students in written narrative. We will also give written objective
pre- and posttests of students' knowledge about global warming.
- Motivation. We will assess the extent
to which the students were motivated to learn and the extent of
their enjoyment using questionnaires developed and validated for
other projects.
- Collaboration. An innovative feature
of this project is the requirement that students collaborate in
a VE. We will describe the extent of that collaboration from
protocols developed for the study of group learning (Cortes, 1993)
and will assess the effectiveness of that collaboration from interviews
with selected students.
- Presence. Presence is the sensation
that one is in a real place when in fact one is in a VE. We will
assess the degree of presence students experience while studying
global warming using self-report instruments developed at HITL
by Hoffman, Hullfish and Houston (1994).
- Technical. We will document all software,
technical development and support activities, and use this information
to recommend whether to continue the project and to develop specifications
for future work.
To support these activities, we require
a research assistant for the winter and spring quarters of 1997.
Timeline
The project will run from July 1, 1996 to
June 30, 1997, and will proceed as follows:
July - August: Plan project and software
design, design assessment tools.
September - December: Implement and debug
distributed, shared global warming VE; select collaborating class
and teacher.
January - March: Run technical trials and
refine VE; identify students at Children's Hospital; conduct project;
gather data.
March - June: Analyze data; package software
for further demonstrations; write proposals; write final report.
References
Bricken, M., & Byrne, C.M. (1993). Summer
students in virtual reality: A pilot study on educational applications
of virtual reality technology. In A. Wexelblat (Ed.), Virtual
reality applications and explorations. Cambridge, MA: Academic
Press Professional.
Byrne, C.M. (1993) Virtual Reality in Education.
Seattle, WA: Human Interface Technology Laboratory Technical Report,
R-93-6).
Byrne, C.M. (1996). Water on tap: Using Virtual
Reality to teach atomic structure. Ph.D. Dissertation, College
of Engineering, University of Washington. HTML Document
.
Byrne, C.M. , Furness, T., & Winn, W.D.
(1995, April).The use of virtual reality for teaching atomic/molecular
structure. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational
Research Association, San Francisco.
Dede, C., & Loftin, B. (1994)The design
of artificial realities to improve learning Newtonian Mechanics.
(Online document, World Wide Web page),
URL = http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/cssb/vr/ScienceSpace/ScienceSpace.html.
Hoffman, H.G., Hullfish, K.C., & Houston,
S. J. (1994). Virtual-reality monitoring. Paper presented
at 35th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, St. Louis,
Missouri.
Mandeville, J.R., Furness, T., Kawahata, M.,
et al. (1995). Greenspace: Creating a distributed virtual environment
for global applications. Proceedings of IEEE Networked Virtual
Reality Workshop.
Osberg, K.M. (1993). Virtual Reality and Education:
A look at both sides of the sword. Seattle, WA: HITL Technical
Report.
Rose, H., & Billinghurst, M. (1995). "Zengo
Sayu": An immersive educational environment for learning
Japanese. Seattle, WA: HITL Technical Report.
Winn, W.D. (1995). Virtual Reality in the classroom:
The Virtual Reality Roving Vehicle project. Technological Horizons
of Education, December.
Winn, W.D., Hoffman, H., & Osberg, K. (1995,
April). Semiotics and the design of objects, actions and interactions
in virtual environments. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the
American Educational Research Association, San Francisco.
Contacts:
Bill Winn billwinn@hitl.washington.edu
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