Many professions teach new entrants to the profession through an apprenticeship, in which they progressively build knowledge of the profession through making peripheral contributions to the professionals with whom they are apprenticing. Lave and Wenger have theorized that this learning is facilitated by legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) within a community of practice. This is a very difficult thing to achieve in an academic environment, especially in a face-to-face instructional mode. Using commercial off-the-shelf components, this project will replicate a portion of the real world in the form of an online 3D virtual world, and see if and how students form these ''communities of practice'' while solving assigned problems within this world. Much like a multiplayer online game, students will work in teams to solve problems for simulated businesses in the world, much as they would do after graduation. The only difference is that, while students are expected to collaborate with each other within the environment, they would also be collaborating with conversational ''bots'' and other objects (artifacts) as well, who represent employees, managers, and business objects (e.g., merchandise, tools, etc.), serving as containers that possess knowledge of the domain of interest. This exploratory project will research the following questions: 1) Do students learn technology problem solving better using the virtual world, than they do without it? Why? 2) Do students build better domain and conceptual models in this environment? 3) Does student involvement in virtual worlds provide a greater degree of legitimate peripheral participation than traditional course projects and exercises?, 4) Do virtual worlds facilitate the creation of mini-communities of learning, better than discussion groups and computer-mediated group projects?, 5) Do student prefer working in the virtual world over working with traditional course materials?, and 6) How should the environment and artifacts be designed to facilitate student interaction?
This project has the potential to provide important preliminary information regarding the effectiveness of virtual worlds such as Second Life as a medium for computer science instruction. Further, given that such virtual worlds appear as sophisticated games to students, instruction in such environments has the potential to increase student interest in computer science as a field.
