Beyond Serious Games: Virtual Learning Environments for Understanding Complex Knowledge and Skills
报告人:
Professor Michael J. Jacobson, Ph.D. （The University of Sydney）
Michael J. Jacobson, PhD is a Professor and Chair of Education in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at The University of Sydney.
报告时间:
2013-04-23 10:00
报告地点:
文南楼404教室
主办单位:
教育研究院
简介:
The use of games to serve educational purposes, sometimes referred to as “serious games,” has been receiving considerable recent attention. Implicit in much of the research in this area is that learning mainly occurs in the virtual experiences of the serious game and that learners will in turn be able to apply or use their new understandings and knowledge skills to new problems and contexts. In contrast, the research discussed in this talk explores the thesis that virtual experiences may be able to reflect salient aspects of the cultural practices of science as part of the learning activities; that is, learning does not occur “in” the virtual experiences of a serious game, rather, learning is mediated by virtual experiences that reflect culturally authentic practices in modern science. Specifically, the practice of science in the 21st century is increasingly embracing computational modeling techniques to compliment traditional quantitative and observational approaches for conducting research. Yet, despite calls that students learn science by doing science as inquiry, students in Australia and internationally have relatively few opportunities to do computational scientific inquiry in ways that mirror computational modeling being done in scientific research.In this talk, I discuss research over the past three years in which my team has developed an agent-based virtual environment consisting of an immersive virtual world for experiencing and exploring a complex ecosystem. The system incorporates predator-prey interactions based on computational biology modeling techniques that are linked to an agent-based modeling tool. I discuss findings from classroom studies involving the use of the Omosa Virtual Worldfor students to engage in computational scientific inquiry as they learned about experimental design and a predator-prey ecosystem. Implications of this approach are discussed.
