This project will develop a prototype intelligent cyberlearning platform for middle school audiences at a museum location to test and evaluate the use of virtual learning technologies. The content for this test is focused on sustainability issues that enable students to develop an age-appropriate understanding of the relationships between specific conservation decisions, energy use, human health, and population growth within Earth's ecosystem. The prototype cyberlearning system will demonstrate how users can learn about science topics by interacting with a display of environmental factors that enable them to explore the impact of social, economic, and technological forces that may change one existing state and condition to another. The system will enable users to understand the interrelationships of those elements by enabling them to change conditions and then observing the effect of the changes they make on the conditions presented in the initial model.
The prototype intelligent cyberlearning system will provide a unique integration of a sophisticated agent-based modeling simulation of environmental, social, and economic phenomena with three advanced learning technologies: game-based learning systems, intelligent tutoring systems, and narrative-centered learning systems. The game-based and narrative aspects of the project are embodied in the interactive time-travel focus of the 3D display on a multi-touch surface computing table in which users will play the role of environmental scientists who have been charged with helping earth become a thriving green planet. They will go back in time and be given the opportunity to make different decisions on any range of options. After they make their decisions, they will travel forward in time to see the results of their decisions. All of the interactions will be used to dynamically generate their time-travel adventures. The intelligent tutoring system will track user's problem-solving activities in the simulated world. As users make decisions, the intelligent tutoring system will draw inferences about their level of understanding of key environmental concepts. Given the current problem-solving goal (e.g., reduce green house gases) and the current state of the environment (e.g., climatological state, earth's population, factory emissions), the intelligent tutoring system will draw on its knowledge of common environmental misconceptions to assist students as they progress through the sustainability narratives. The intelligent tutoring system will receive the updated state from the agent-based simulation, which will then provide explanatory commentary and advice through the virtual human to the users about the causal connections underlying the results of the decisions they have made. Similarly, during the course of decision-making, users will be able to request advice, and the same computational framework will drive the virtual human's advice generation functionalities.
The project will design, development, deploy, and evaluate a prototype intelligent cyberlearning platform for sustainability that supports independent, but guided, exploration of science topics. Because all users interactions will be accompanied by a virtual environmental scientist who will narrate their journeys and offer problem-solving advice, users will be afforded rich learning opportunities that support independent inquiry but also provided guided exploration of complex science topics. With a focus on group learning experiences in the out-of-school setting, the virtual environmental scientist will answer questions that will engage groups of users in a collaborative effort to understand the rich interrelationships of sustainability. The project will demonstrate the transformative potential of intelligent cyberlearning systems that integrate agent-based modeling with game-based learning, intelligent tutoring systems, and narrative-centered learning in an out-of-school setting to enable users to experience science in fundamentally new ways.
Recent years have seen a growing recognition of the transformative potential of cyberlearning technologies for STEM education. This demonstration project focused on the development and formative evaluation of a prototype intelligent cyberlearning platform for sustainability. The prototype system enabled learners to explore sustainability issues and develop an age-appropriate understanding of the relationships between specific conservation decisions, energy use, human health, and population growth within Earth's ecosystem. The prototype cyberlearning system demonstrated how learners can engage with sustainability science by interacting with a range of environmental factors that enable them to explore the impact of social, economic, and technological forces that may change one set of environmental conditions into another. Learners’ objectives are to interact with the system’s tabletop display to collaboratively reconfigure an unsustainable virtual environment into a sustainable environment. The virtual environment’s three-dimensional appearance is stylized, and at first appears to be brown and near lifeless. Learners are advised to explore alternate choices for improving the sustainability of the virtual environment and collaboratively manipulate the environment to explore the effects of alternate environmental decisions in order to create a sustainable solution. The prototype system enables learners to understand the interrelationships of environmental factors by allowing them to change conditions and then observe the effects of those decisions on sustainability. Intellectual Merit The overarching goal of the work was to create a prototype intelligent cyberlearning system for sustainability modeling that targets visitors age 9-12 at the project’s partner museum, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. A key objective of the demonstration project was to lay the foundation for a future full-scale project. The demonstration project had the following three objectives: 1. Create a prototype intelligent cyberlearning system for sustainability education. To promote effective sustainability learning experiences, the research team designed and developed Future Worlds, a prototype of an intelligent cyberlearning system that integrates game-based learning technologies, intelligent tutoring systems, and narrative-centered learning environments. Future Worlds enables learners to take virtual journeys through time to investigate the impact of their environmental policy decisions. 2. Develop and install a prototype intelligent sustainability cyberlearning museum exhibit. The research team developed a prototype intelligent cyberlearning system for sustainability, Future Worlds, that creates multi-visitor interactive sustainability learning experiences via a tabletop display exhibit. In a series of studies the system was field-tested and was then installed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. 3. Evaluate the impact of the intelligent cyberlearning system on sustainability education in the museum setting. To investigate the impact of the Future Worlds cyberlearning system on learning, the research team conducted a formative evaluation of how the Future Worlds museum exhibit improves learners’ sustainability content knowledge, environmental problem solving, and attitudes toward environmental science. Broader Impacts More than 150 participants age 9-12 have experienced the highly interactive problem-solving scenarios provided by the prototype Future Worlds system. Studies with elementary and middle school students conducted at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences through summer camps and field trips from local schools found that the prototype creates highly engaging collaborative learning experiences and yields significant learning gains on the selected sustainability topics. Together, the prototype and its accompanying studies have established the foundation for a full-scale intelligent cyberlearning system that will motivate learners to develop a deeper understanding of sustainability to better appreciate the impact of society’s actions on the environment.
