Document JMM95.23
Abstract
The Virtual Academy is an educational model based on multi-age teams of students and adults working through the Internet to build and use virtual worlds for educational purposes. These collaborations are mediated by a range of tools ranging from electronic mail to hypermedia and video links, and result in the creation of simulation-based role-playing adventure games within the ExploreNet software environment. ExploreNet is an Internet based multimedia MUD ("Multi-User Domain") constructed specifically for educational experimentation.
This paper describes the Virtual Academy Model, the ExploreNet software system, and an experiment conducted in the spring of 1995. The paper describes the evolution of features of ExploreNet's user interface and their relevance to collaborative work by children.
1. Introduction
Students as Workers. Constructivism (Bruner, 1990) denotes a theory and a strategy for the development of educational curricula and materials. Learners are viewed as creating personal mental models of subject matter and relationships through active manipulation of the subject material. These experiences often occur via situated cognition (CTG, 1990), in which the students are engaged in a role playing game or a story line related to the subject matter.
Constructionism refers to a closely related body of theory and practice that has been used to build educational software (Harel, 1991.) Students are believed to learn superior thinking skills if they build actual working models of the things being understood. These models may range from computer software, to mechanical gadgets, to dramatic renditions of historical events. Constructionism has been very popular with educational reformers in the last decade. However, initial successes in constructionist experiments with computer based materials have proven hard to replicate in ordinary schools (Holden, 1989.)
Several educational reform programs address this problem by working to develop schools which are hospitable to constructionist learning. These programs usually employ the "student as worker" model (Sizer, 1992.) Students take responsibility for the completion of coherent, meaningful projects similar to adult work. There is good evidence that the results improve students' chances of success in college and later life (Cushman, 1994.)
Obstacles. Educational reform is always hard. Transforming schools from the information-transfer model to constructionist models usually requires extensive retraining of teachers, and new kinds of support structures. Many of the problems are logistical: master teachers and prototype schools may be far away. Funds may be unavailable to support teacher retraining, and no consensus may exist that a school's operations need to fundamentally change. In this climate, how is broad-scale revolution, or even modest reform, possible?
Technology and Opportunity. The Internet may catalyze some of the necessary changes. Once a school's computers are networked, the problems of distance and isolation is replaced by what could be considered an interface design problem, to wit:
Can information tools be created so as to propagate successful models of constructionist learning between schools?
There is little doubt that children as young as sixth graders can carry out impressive feats of constructionism using "adult" Internet tools (e. g. (McCullen, 1995.) ) The challenge is to incorporate such activities into a curricular model and tool-set which meets the students' needs while infecting new schools with constructionist enthusiasm and know-how.
This paper describes an experimental project in computer-human interface and curricular design to meet this challenge. Section 2 describes Multi-User Domains, which are Internet-based role-playing game environments. Section 3 describes the Virtual Academy - a hypothetical educational model based on MUD concepts and constructionist principles. Section 4 describes the ExploreNet software system which was constructed to test the Virtual Academy model. Section 5 describes preliminary experiments that have been conducted. Section 6 contains conclusions and descriptions of future work.
2. Multi-User Domains (MUDS)
In the early 1980's, a text-based version of the popular Dungeons and Dragons(TM) game began to appear on timeshared computers. These MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) were typically produced and operated by amateurs for purely recreational purposes. (Curtis, 1992.) When using a MUD, the user sees a textual description of a space - a cave, a room, an outdoor scene. Various typed commands such as 'look hammer' can be used to elicit written descriptions of objects (such as a hammer) which are mentioned as being in the room. Some objects will 'behave' (i. e. emit textual descriptions of what they are supposedly doing) if properly triggered. Users appear (are described) to other users, and can talk (by typing) to anyone in that room or space. In many MUDs, users may under certain circumstances add new features or even new rooms to the virtual universe. One's own character (or avatar) can have properties which may vary as the game proceeds.
MUDs have proven extremely popular with young people. MUDs present a rather natural way of interacting with information and with other people. Several efforts are now underway to develop coherent educational approaches to the use of MUDs for education (TECFA, 1995.)
Habitats. In the mid-1980's an interactive, graphical role-playing game called Habitat was developed by a small team of LucasFilm employees. (Morningstar, 1990, Yoshida, 1994). Simple cartoon-like animated figures moved through a flat-screen simulated world. They communicated by typed text messages which appeared over the characters' heads. The software ran on low-cost Commodore computers and used a commercial timesharing network.
The original authors of Habitat have suggested that the term 'habitat' should denote the class of similar shared graphical play/work spaces. In mid-1995 several habitats are appearing on the Internet. These are primarily recreational and experimental systems being distributed via the WorldWideWeb (Communities, 1995.)
The authors have constructed a habitat named ExploreNet , which was specifically designed to support a constructionist model of education. This Virtual Academy model of situated learning will now be described.
3. Learning and the Virtual Academy Model
Why would one expect an educational payoff from the effort required to create graphical simulated worlds and populate them with animated figures? Later in this section, four learning issues will be considered: engagement, cognitive styles, personal aliasing and metacognition. However it is first necessary to introduce the Virtual Academy model.
Overview.
The Virtual Academy is conceived as resembling an electronic version of popular youth organizations such as the Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts. In these activities, children of various ages work to achieve specific constructive learning tasks in a rich experiential setting. Participants achieve various ranks by progressive demonstrations of skill including leadership, and often learn from one another. Adult volunteer mentors provide guidance. The basic milieu of this activity is the WorldWideWeb.
In the Virtual Academy students will be guided to learn problem-solving, communication and information-handling skills rather than cooking, camping and handicrafts. ExploreNet, a multimedia role-playing environment, is the centerpiece of a collection of Internet tools to be used for collaborative work. Students will construct various small-scale simulated "worlds" and use them to support dramatizations ranging from historical events to the behaviors of microorganisms. To organize these activities, the Virtual Academy has two main components: the structural model and the curricular model.
The Structural Model.
There are four levels of involvement for students: guest, cast member, world builder and tool builder.
Guests: a group of students initially visits an ExploreNet world by simply "logging in" from their home or classroom, as though a virtual field trip was occurring. Guests will adopt a role (an existing character within the scheme of the world they are visiting). Guests are provided with a brief background story and an objective, but need little a priori knowledge about ExploreNet.
Cast Members: this group of students has been trained to act some of the pre-defined roles of an interactive drama or "quest", for the benefit of the guests. Often the cast members are in character as animals; sometimes they also serve as prop or special effects managers. Some Cast Members are tasked as Mentors (guides) to groups of beginning Guests. Cast Members receive their initial training in a particular world by first experiencing it as Guests.
The recruitment and training of Cast Members will be mediated by several Internet tools in addition to ExploreNet. These include audio and video channels and specially constructed Web pages.
World Builders: this group of students and older (possibly adult) mentors has learned the necessary design and construction skills to create a specific world, with an educational theme and mission. World builders produce scripts, train cast members, observe the operation of their world and help to measure its educational effectiveness. They then modify the world for future use.
World builders use PC-based painting and word processing programs and share resources, storyboards and plans via Web sites.
Tool Builders: this group of students (usually high school and university students) is involved in modifying the basic tools used by World Builders to create worlds, and by cast members and guests to act within those worlds.
The Food Chain. The key factor in the Virtual Academy model is that each of these groups explicitly depends on the others' activities. Tool makers need user/critics for their tools. World builders need user/critics of the simulations they construct. Cast members need guests with whom to exercise their understanding of the subject being explored. Guests need the infrastructure provided by the more advanced groups.
The Curricular Model.
How do all these participants learn the necessary skills to participate? The Virtual Academy Project is collaborating with the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) to develop a self-sustaining curricular model (McDonald, 1991.) In the Coalition's schools, exhibition projects occur within a framework of rubrics or check-lists of required skills. These rubrics help to template a student's specific choice of roles and experiences. The rubrics collectively serve as a skeleton for the student's portfolio.
The Virtual Academy project is currently developing rubrics modeled after CES prototypes, to guide the learning of world builders and tool builders. Middle school world-builders in experimental classes are developing multimedia materials using WorldWideWeb tools, and progressively refining them into ExploreNet worlds. University of Central Florida students are constructing more elaborate virtual worlds and tools to support world-building. The iterative development and testing of these rubrics is expected to require several years.
Learning Issues.
Engagement. An essential element of video games which makes them so engaging is that the player occupies a location in the simulated space and is in some sense vulnerable to the forces acting there. Thus, a personalized simulation with avatars is expected to lead to increased persistence of student effort. Particularly for students with poor histories of achievement in traditional academic work, the immediate feedback seems promising. The challenge which the Virtual Academy Model addresses is to make the experience educationally worthwhile, not merely entertaining.
Learning Styles. A wealth of literature (e. g. Messick, 1976; Snow, 1980) documents differences in the manner in which people perceive, think and act on information. Field independent people, for instance, have relatively strong competencies in analytical function coupled with reduced social orientation compared to field dependent people. The use of avatars in multi-user simulations may have a much more significant impact on the experience of field dependent subjects, than that of field-independent subjects. Other differences in learning styles will probably have similar degrees of impact on the usefulness of avatars.
Personal Aliasing. The group dynamics of children are crucial to the child's development. Children learn passivity when they are ridiculed for failures. In a domain where you can be anonymous, it may be possible to explore relationships and personal styles that you would not dare try in person. Since live humans care greatly about how they look and are perceived, giving them control over their avatar's appearance is a form of empowerment they may not have in real life. It would not generally suffice to simply eliminate the human representation altogether, because social interactions are strongly based on geometric properties such as closeness, orientation, threatening gestures, facial expression, etc.
Farmer (1994) reports that when a sampling of Habitat players were asked whether or not they act like themselves when interacting in the Habitat environment, about half said yes, half said no. Again when they were asked whether their avatar was a representation of themselves or another being, about half said yes, and half said no. Strangely, the two groups did not correlate at all. Thus, around 25% of the people said that the avatar was another being and acted unlike themselves. Another 25% indicated that the avatar was a representation of themselves, but that they did not use it to act like they normally act. This result indicates that a variety of possible relationships between avatar and owner can exist.
Metacognition and the "Abstraction Trombone". Humans understand things on many levels from highly concrete (actually touching and lifting a brick) to abstract ("masonry's density is about 4 g/cc."). Simulations provide varying levels of abstraction, with immersive virtual simulations approaching realistic concreteness in vision and perhaps sound. For the present at least, these systems cannot provide very much realism in other sensory domains.
Unlike the real world or a real laboratory, the virtual simulation can provide a continuously varying degree of abstraction. Visual realism (e. g. photographic textures) can be added or abstraction (e. g. zooming back to take in the larger picture) can be increased. Putting human figures into a world, even a microscopic world, renders it more concrete.
Metacognition is a multivalent term. As used by (Flavell 79), metacognition denotes the conscious awareness of one's learning process. By becoming aware of what one doesn't know, and what tools are available for overcoming obstacles, learners can take charge of their own learning. In the present effort, the spectrum of abstraction is being used as an explicit metacognitive tool in the curriculum design.
The present effort attempts to teach children how to deliberately move along the spectrum of concreteness, from the world where "I am there" - being chased by the shark, or being the shark - back to a God's eye view of the scene, then to an overview of the sea full of fish, and even back to a graph showing fish population varying over time. Metaphorically speaking, the objective is to teach kids how to skillfully "play the low concrete notes and the high general ones" - on the abstraction trombone. The associated learning process for metacognitive skills corresponds chronologically to the maturation in roles from a guest (where everything is concrete) through action as a cast member, to a world builder - where much of the work is planning.
The world builder's view is quite abstract because a specific world is seen as an instance of many possible worlds. World builders don't need to be personally represented in the world-under-construction precisely because what they are doing is abstract. Guests need visible 'characters' precisely because they need to be concretely involved within the metaphor of the simulation.
The Significance of Avatars and Role-Playing. The foregoing discussion of potential impact areas was intended to explain why first-person role-playing simulations offer promise for educational change, compared to impersonal simulations. As experience is gained, specific hypotheses concerning these and other possible influences on learning will be framed and tested.
The software environment in which these ideas are being explored will now be described.
4. The Development of ExploreNet
The central objective of ExploreNet has always been to facilitate the construction and use of role-playing games for educational purposes, and cooperative learning of many kinds. This section describes some of the user interface design issues raised and the solutions adopted.
Antecedents. The core concepts of ExploreNet were motivated by the original LucasFilm Habitat system (Morningstar, 1990) and its Japanese reincarnation (Yoshida, 1994.) Consideration was given to a three dimensional approach but the simplicity for students of constructing two dimensional graphics images prevailed. The key principles and consequent features will now be discussed.
No surprises. Children acquire computer experience from many sources. The basic interaction of ExploreNet must not conflict with skills already learned. This principle had several consequences. Early versions of the software followed Windows 3.1 practice and made different use of the left and right mouse buttons. However, this feature proved difficult to learn and conflicted with Macintosh experience. Now both buttons have the same effect.
In addition, pulldown menus operate differently in the Macintosh and Windows environment. With a Mac, a button is pressed to open a menu and released to select the currently highlighted item. In Windows, two button-presses are required - one to open a menu and another to select the desired item. To avoid this conflict, ExploreNet does not use pulldown menus. Instead, a window opens with a list of choices for action (an "action menu".) The last choice is always 'NO ACTION'. Unlike pulldown menus, this window remains open until some choice or NO ACTION is selected. This usage pattern contradicts no Mac or Windows habits, and is quite easily learned.
Avoid icons for actions. (Norman, 1990) asserts that the "desktop metaphor" and icons have been overrated. Particularly for new users, icons impose an additional learning burden unless their design is truly inspired. Icons' principal virtue seems to be compactness, but this in turn leads to complex and cluttered iconic menus. ExploreNet users select from a list of short English phrases to specify actions: "KNEEL DOWN" or "PICK UP LANTERN". World builders do not have to invent icons to represent new actions; they simply give the action a name.
Move toward Virtuality. Norman (op cit.) advocates moving toward a kind of direct manipulation of informational objects, rather than overtly symbolic icons. In the ExploreNet context, for instance, rather than selecting a hammer and then (from its action menu) choosing the action HIT, it should be possible to move the hammer vigorously toward an object until it stops with an audible "bang". This migration is perhaps the most challenging ongoing design activity for ExploreNet's builders, as it raises deep issues of realtime simulation in distributed environments. Some of these issues are addressed in (Hughes, 1995.)
Keep world-building simple. Programmable MUDS such as LambdaMoo usually support rich programming languages which are the object of much research. ExploreNet's design philosophy is to provide most behaviors by tasking a Cast Member with making the right thing occur at the right time. By analogy with live theater, it's far easier to have a stage-hand run the wind-and-thunder machine, flash the lights etc. than to automate these effects. It also encourages the team planning and performance which is one of the Virtual Academy's central tenets.
Cast Member control of story. The Cast Members know the overall story line and collectively serve like "Dungeon Masters" in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. They have to improvise as necessary to move the Guests toward the goal. To assist them, ExploreNet provides several features. For instance, cast Members can observe the location and possession of all props. Cast Members who are designated as Mentors to specific groups of Guests also have control over which exits or portals (connections to other scenes) are open to the Guests. Cast Members can communicate privately with individual Guests to give them guidance.
5. Experiments
Several pilot experiments have been completed, but no formal evaluations of educational effectiveness have been performed. The information gathered is primarily formative rather than summative. This section summarizes lessons learned from one elementary-school experiment. For a detailed report on this experiment, see (Moshell, 1995.)
In April of 1995, the authors conducted three weeks of experimentation with the ExploreNet system at Hungerford Elementary School. Hungerford is sited in the historic town of Eatonville, Florida, which is the first municipality in the United States which was created by, and has always been administered by African-Americans. The school's population is 95% Black.
As the FoxFire project (Wigginton, 1972) has shown, students can be strongly motivated by curricular connections to local culture. Eatonville was the home of Zora Neale Hurston, an internationally-renowned African-American folklorist and novelist. Her autobiography provided rich material for the development of interactive stories.
Concepts. The essential idea was to work with one class each of third, fourth and fifth grade students in order to look for age-based differences in performance. Once the Hungerford students had been Guests in an initial 45 minute experience, they would know the tricks and secrets of playing the game. They would then serve as Cast Members for another group of students. The experimenters would observe how the overall interaction moved forward, which parts of the software worked well or poorly.
The actual game to be played was called The Egg Quest, and was based on a very simple story in Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston's autobiography (Hurston, 1970.) She reported that she and her friends would sometimes go to the barn, steal chickens' eggs, build a fire, boil the eggs and eat them. In the Egg Quest game, the chickens are played by Cast Members and can speak. It is necessary for the Guests to discover some corn and use it to bait the chickens away from their nests. Other puzzles are based on the building of a fire and preparing a pot to cook the eggs. The mentor characters (an owl and a dog) give hints to the Guest characters as needed. A cat character controlled by a Cast Member plays the antagonist, making it undesirable for Guests to be careless with the eggs they have acquired.
Initially a formal quantitative study of learning outcomes was contemplated, and arrangements were made to provide the same amount of contact time (45 minutes for Guests) to matching classes for each grade, with a teacher reading the Egg Quest story and a written post-test. However, numerous equipment breakdowns and other unscheduled interruptions made it impractical to gather meaningful data. Also, as the students interacted with the software it quickly became apparent that many qualitative lessons were to be learned by the system's developers, before quantitative evaluation was appropriate.
Experiments. Six computers were set up on two cafeteria-style tables in a classroom. Three computers were shared by four students as Cast Members; the other three on the other table were shared by four students as Guests. Adult guides taught the Guests the four essential skills: moving their characters with the mouse, 'talking' by typing, picking up props and eliciting actions (including dropping props) from their characters. Different combinations of age groups were tried as Cast Members and Guests.
Approximately ninety students - thirty each from third, fourth and fifth grades - participated in the game as Guests. Of these approximately 45 also participated as Cast Members.
Observations. There was no appreciable difference in the speed with which third versus fifth graders solved the puzzles and 'won' the game. About 60% of all the groups of Guests succeeded in getting the eggs from the chickens and cooking them before the 50 minute class period ran out.
There was considerable difference in the abilities of the Cast Members to manage the situation. Third graders were clearly unable to abstract themselves from the game itself and to become managers of others' experience. The students assigned as mentor characters would often pick up the props themselves and solve the puzzle. This resembles real-world experience, in which children (or adults) often will say "here, let me show you" and take over a task they are supposedly teaching.
Fifth graders were somewhat more capable of refraining from playing the game, but even with direct instructions they did not uniformly remain in character as Cast Members.
All participants reported enjoying the game and many students begged the researchers to be allowed another turn as Cast Members.
Lessons Learned about the User Interface
A number of minor but annoying details of the user interface were improved on the basis of the Hungerford experiment. The design was revised from a two-button to a one-button mouse method; provided with a fixed text-input window rather than a floating window, and the action menu structure described earlier in this paper was implemented. The following comments concern lessons learned about more substantive interface issues.
Visible possessions. A common source of disengagement was that a prop would disappear but the players couldn't tell who had it in their possession. It would probably be better if possessions were either shown as being held by the characters, or if the character's shape were to change ("full pockets") when they possess an object.
Lack of sound. Without sound effects or speech there is no easy way to attract the user's attention to a mentor character. However in classrooms, the use of speaker based sound would distract adjacent learners, so earphones seem essential for this feature. Text to speech technology is being investigated for subsequent versions of ExploreNet.
Typing. Lack of typing and spelling skills seems to be an obstacle to maintaining a sufficient pace. Composing text messages was time consuming and leaves other players wondering what that person is doing. With the older students (fifth graders) this was less of a problem and they often got engaged in composing elaborate messages. However, their fellow-travelers didn't know what was happening and so would get bored, or abandon the earnest writers.
Recommendations: Construct stories for younger children that do not rely very much on textual input from the students. If the encourage-ment of reading is a goal, then make sure that the written "speech" of the Cast Members is essential to the story line.
Make it possible for other Guests to know that one of their member is engaged in writing a message. Consider showing the message character by character as it is composed, to increase the immediacy of the communication.
This problem may have already been ameliorated because use of the system's text input window no longer stops animation or takes up screen space. This question will be investigated in the next field trials.
Direct speech communications will also be tried when technically feasible. This would perhaps reduce the system's utility for the improvement of reading/writing skills, but improve its usefulness for younger children for whom typing is quite difficult.
Identity. The second most frequent question was "Who did that?" There was a strong desire to identify the other characters' players. Students often wanted to direct messages to specific other players. The identity of the speaker adds context to the message. Therefore, the benefits or disadvantages of anonymity may be dependent on the specific group of learners.
Scenarios have not yet been constructed that are sufficiently engaging (and it may be impossible in principle) to submerge the strong interpersonal dynamics acting between school-age children. It may be that only when students are really telecommunicating with strangers will this "who's that" phenomenon become less of a distraction.
Recommendation: Think about ways of using this strong desire to communicate with the actor rather than the character, as a positive factor rather than as an obstacle to engagement. Perhaps let the students design their own on-screen characters (e.g. from an avatar-builder kit) and use their own names.
Lessons Learned about the Educational Model.
The Mentor Character. Animal Mentors were not much used as sources of information by the Guests. The tendency was to seek help from available adults rather than on-screen animal guides. This may be because speech is easier than typing and reading, or because the adults were available and were not instructed to stay quiet. Some students said that they want to be able to talk to other characters more easily. Also - adults, conveniently close by, represent authority in traditional classroom culture. Sometimes when students asked for help and it wasn't available, they would simply wait rather than "talk" to the animal guides or observe others.
The most frequent question was "how do I ..." and was almost always asked of an adult mentor; occasionally of a student sitting alongside; and almost never of an on-screen character.
Recommendation: make the adult guides less available so as to emphasize the importance of working with the on-line mentor characters. Explore text-to-speech as a possible output medium to make the on-screen mentors more engaging.
Mentors had a tendency to play the game rather than guiding the guests. Sometimes they would give commands rather than hints to the guests. On some occasions the guides were reluctant to help the guests. This may be due to insufficient guide training and experience.
Recommendation: Experiment with middle-school children as mentors to see if they can stay focused on the role of guide, rather than playing the game. Fourth and fifth graders from our study population had difficulty doing this, and third graders showed little useful skill. Study ways of better training the Cast Members. The ones in this experiment had only one guest-experience (of 45 minutes duration) and about 10 minutes of training in Cast responsibilities.
Cast Members' Knowledge of Guests' Actions. Often, guides are in the dark as to what Guests were doing. They would either observe inactivity, or actions that didn't seem to have anything to do with the game. Sometimes the apparent inactivity was due to the guest's slowly typing out a message or seeking assistance from an adult.
Recommendations: Guides should be able to see what guests are doing; what menus or windows are open, etc. They should be able to ask if the guest needs help, at any time - even if the guest is in the midst of some operation. This might need to be a voice channel because guests are so engaged in their work that they ignore screen activities they aren't generating.
Collaboration. The principal failure of the story from its creators' point of view, was that it did not induce collaborative behavior. The students within a two-person group were sitting next to one another and thus could collaborate by talking out loud. Collaboration was expected to be needed when the eggs were uncovered, as one character was to drop the corn at some distance from the chickens, while another stood ready to get the eggs. In fact, usually the corn-carrier would drop it quite close to the chickens. When a chicken would uncover the eggs, all the characters would make a mad dash for the eggs. The resulting pile-up would make it difficult for anyone to pick up the eggs.
Once someone had succeeded, it was impossible for the others to tell who had the eggs. The classroom would frequently echo with cries of "Who got the eggs!?" This quickly led to a software modification in which each character acquiring a possession would automatically emit an announcement. For instance, If Zora picked up a lantern this message would appear: "Zora: I got the lantern!" These messages look just like player-generated speech.
In a similar vein, rather than each team having acquired half of the firewood/pot setup (as was intended), usually the most aggressive player of the four would have discovered that props are useful and would have circulated throughout the world, picking up everything. The rest of the quest would then devolve into a lot of debate about what should be done, with one player holding all the assets. Those kids usually looked rather smug. When this would happen, one of the four guests would often drop out and start star-gazing or daydreaming or verbally interacting with the rest of the class.
Recommendation: If you intend to force collaborative behavior you need to build in tasks which CANNOT be accomplished by a single player who is much more aggressive than the others.
6. Conclusions and Future Research
One of the clearest outcomes of the Hungerford experiments was the need for repeated experience with Cast Members' training and deployment, using older students. In earlier pilot trials with college students as Cast Members, the scenario worked very well and the Guests uniformly met their goals. The next experiments will involve middle school (sixth to eight grade) students. Currently, two classes of students at Maitland Middle School and Coral Springs Middle School are learning how to construct ExploreNet worlds, and will then test them on their peers and on elementary students.
ExploreNet is now moving from a technology-dominated phase of development to a curriculum-dominated phase. The world-building experiments and their extension to other schools will occupy much of 1995 and 1996. During this interval, habitat technology will be rapidly developed by multiple commercial and non-commercial organizations. New ideas and tools will be incorporated into the Virtual Academy whenever appropriate. A principal technical goal is to take advantage of the rapidly growing collection of WorldWideWeb tools including Hot Java and other conceptual extensions to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML.)
A major goal for 1996 is to develop a half-dozen or more collaborations with groups interested in specific subject areas. Using ExploreNet technology and the Virtual Academy model, these groups will build simulated worlds for biology, history, language arts or other traditional disciplines or for integrated curricula.
A second major goal is to expand the project's involvement with the Coalition of Essential Schools. Coalition schools will be paired with traditional schools to explore the propagation of the Coalition's portfolio and rubric-based exhibition project techniques.
In September 1995 the project received funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ExploreNet will be extended to selected Department of Defense Dependents' Schools, as part of a broad gauge investigation of the utility of networked educational technology.
7. Acknowledgments
The authors appreciate the support of the University of Central Florida, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), AutoDesk, Microsoft, Digitalk, Nanyang Technological University and AT&T. We are most grateful to the teachers and students of Hungerford Elementary, Maitland Middle and Coral Springs Middle Schools. Kay Stanney, Ed Rinalducci and Mark Johnson helped to design the Hungerford experiment and Mark Kilby, Homer Whittaker and Daniel Tan were invaluable in supporting the actual experiment. All opinions expressed in this paper are, however, solely due to the authors.
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