This project will study the efficacy of using simulation environments that include artistic elements to enhance STEM curricula at the high school level and for freshmen non-STEM majors in college. Simulation environments are a subset of virtual reality environments, and they offer new approaches for engaging students in STEM disciplines and encouraging them to pursue further study in those disciplines. A simulation environment which includes artistic components is being developed at the Center for Excellence in Telecommunications and Space (CETS) in the Computer Science Department at Morehouse College. The environment being developed will focus on presenting essential paradigms in the various STEM disciplines via interactive simulations that include elements of artistic creativity and passion. The interactive technologies being developed by CETS represent a series of hands-on activities that utilize advanced capabilities in the areas of location sensing, speech recognition, natural language query, networking, virtual reality, and image manipulation systems. Using these sophisticated tools, students can manipulate, in a virtual environment made up of visual artworks, objects that involve STEM concepts. In the process of engaging in the manipulations students will not just learn the concepts, but also get an opportunity to apply them in the virtual world. Students will then use an information management system designed by CETS to collect and store data about the manipulations and engage in graphical representations of the data. The learning environment will emphasize interactivity, and it will employ a natural language interface along with the CETS location-aware mobile data retrieval system to incorporate the students? movements into the virtual environment.
The education research questions that will be investigated include: Does Simulation Learning (via interactive visual art modules) increase a student's interest in STEM fields?; What is the appropriate orchestration of art and STEM in an interactive environment to produce the largest increase in a student's interest in STEM fields?; Is there a difference in the amount of increased interest between high school students and college freshmen? If so, what would account for observed differences?; and Does an increase in a student's interest in the STEM areas result in the students pursuing undergraduate degrees in STEM fields?
