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.
