9453871 Fox We propose a two-tier project including: a)an assessment task, aimed at evaluating potential of VR in education and identifying the associated R&D issues, b)a planning task, aimed at developing the proposal for the follow-on R&D project at NPAC. The assessment task will be conducted from the perspective of the global scale program towards educational VR. The planning task will identify a set of pilot modules to be developed at NPAC, tested in local schools, and included into the global infrastructure developed by several sites. Within the assessment task, we expect to interact within the NSF guided electronic forum with other sites developing components of information infrastructure. This will allow to both establish unified global strategy and to identify the most appropriate focused modules to be prototyped at NPAC. ***
