Educational games within fully immersive 3D virtual reality environment and assessment of user's possible learning outcomes

• Main Author: Cherenkova, Nina
• Published: University of Reading 2013
• Subjects: 371.33468
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.606368

Educational games are powerful activities in the learning process. They increase learners' motivation, engage them, and help develop not only subject matter knowledge, but also a diverse metacognitive skills set. However, educational games continuously change. Nowadays, Virtual Reality (VR) has become a place that accommodates educational digital games in a very attractive fashion. The virtual worlds can now be accessed through variety of devices ranging from standard desktop computers 10 more advanced systems such as fully immersive 3D VR environments (CAVE-like system) which offer a unique opportunity to be physically immersed. This is one of the factors that makes this advanced technology very attractive to be used for formal education. Therefore this research thesis focuses on possible combinations of educational games and 3D immersive CAVE-like environments. This work collected quantitative analyses of data on teachers' and students ' perceptions of 3D visualisation and fully immersive 3D VR environments. The results from the surveys and previous development of educational applications within ReaCTor (CAVE-like system based at the University of Reading) were used for the design of a language learning application as a case study. Obstacles found during the design and testing procesess indicate the main reasons of environments similar to ReaCTor being not used in formal education. These reasons are, for example, the absence of automatic tools to assess learner's play, and a tool that would let ordinary teachers create educational applications by themselves. Moreover, such tools should be adaptable to any subject area. Finally the thesis suggests a way of governing these obstacles and proposes two solutions for the creation of an assessment tool and a design tool. Both solutions are based on an ontological approach.