Game-based learning using a 3D virtual world in computer engineering education (original) (raw)
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In recent years there has been significant growth in the use of virtual worlds for e-learning. These immersive environments offer enhanced distance learning facilities where students can participate in individual and group activities, using advanced communication tools, inside complex and highly interactive simulations. Video games have entered the mainstream as a popular entertainment format and are starting to be adopted as teaching tools. This paper explores how virtual worlds and video games techniques can be used to create highly immersive and engaging environments for teaching engineering related material. It will show how the presentation layer of remote laboratories, which are traditionally 2-D in nature, could be enhanced by the use of 3-D to facilitate new types of remote interactions and methods of visualizing and interacting with data. The Circuit Warz project is introduced and demonstrates how immersive virtual worlds can be used to create a game based approach to teaching, which supports and complements traditional delivery methods using a collaborative team based competitive format with an underlying hardware infrastructure.
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Three-dimensional Online Virtual Worlds such as Second Life support avatar-based communications, a wide spectrum of online activities, and development of various in-world teaching and learning tools. We have experimented with Second Life in two computer science classes, one at Ohio University, the other at the University of Mary Washington, to enhance software engineering education. We used Second Life as an innovative collaboration and communication tool both in and outside classroom to help facilitate teamwork and interactions among student project team members. Second Life was also used as the virtual office for instructors and teaching assistants to answer students' questions during office hours. In addition, we developed two multi-player online software engineering educational games in Second Life, one based on the Groupthink software specification exercise developed at M.I.T., and the other based on the SimSE game (a 2-D single player game) developed at UC Irvine. By playing these two games, students learned fundamentals of software specification activities and principles of software development processes. In the paper, we will share our experience of using Second Life in two software engineering classes, and discuss its pros and cons based on the data collected from student surveys.
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In recent years there has been significant growth in the use of 3D virtual worlds for e-learning and distance education. These immersive environments offer the ability to create complex, highly interactive simulations using in-world modelling and scripting tools. Virtual learning environments support teaching and learning in an educational context, offering the functionality to manage the presentation, administration and assessment of coursework. However the presentation layer of virtual learning environments are highly restrictive, offering limited opportunities to create highly engaging and immersive user experiences. This paper investigates and demonstrates how virtual learning environments (VLEs) and virtual worlds can be integrated to create learner centred experiential based learning experiences in the area of engineering education and virtual laboratories and how this functionality can be extended to allow the tracking and subsequent recording of user interactions in the virtual world. Engineering Education Island, a virtual space dedicated to teaching engineering related subjects is introduced and the practical use of this additional functionality discussed.
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The use of videogames is an established tool to train a systematic way of thinking that allows users to learn by gaming. In this paper, to address the increasing need of awareness in cybersecurity related issues, we present the realization of a Virtual Reality (VR) videogame targeted towards educating users in the context of cybersecurity.
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Information Security Awareness through a Virtual World: An end-user requirements analysis
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Living in the digital era, computers and the Internet became important tools used by people to support significant parts of their everyday life such as work, education, socializing, entertainment, communication, etc. However, there are certain risks involved in using ICT technologies, and thus all ICT users should be aware of the basic principles of information security and data protection. No matter how much expertise is put into securing information assets and networks (e.g. firewalls, encryption) the human factor always remains a vulnerability. Our vision is to aid towards the development of information security awareness culture by using a 3D Virtual World Learning Environment that will simulate real-life security threat scenarios, examples and counterexamples in a way that different groups of users will experience the risks and combine critical skills, knowledge and collaboration to overcome them, without exposing their organization to real risk. In this paper we provide the results of the end user requirements collection and analysis in order to define and develop the specifications of the aforementioned 3D Virtual World Learning Environment and the specifications of the in-world activities.
Teaching Engineering Education Using Virtual Worlds and Virtual Learning Environments
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In recent years there has been significant growth in the use of 3D virtual worlds for e-learning and distance education. Virtual learning environments' support teaching and learning in an educational context, offering the functionality to manage the presentation, administration and assessment of coursework. However the presentation layer of virtual learning environment's are highly restrictive offering limited opportunities to create highly engaging and immersive user experiences. This paper investigates the suitability of one popular virtual world, Second Life™ for education and teaching purposes. It discusses its functionality and features and assesses its perceived limitations for use in educational context with a particular focus on the ability to link/integrate the virtual world with existing virtual learning environments. A number of demonstrative examples showing how virtual world/virtual learning environments can be integrated will be shown and the potential opportunities that exist in this area discussed.
Development of Serious Games for Teaching Information Security Courses
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Serious games have been used effectively in many educational domains. Games may be utilized efficiently to attract students to information security track. Learning practical knowledge about information security from a game is more engaging and less time consuming than learning through textbooks. Games that closely emulate real-world systems can improve learning about computer security above and beyond just reading technical documents and textbooks. From this perspective, this paper presents six serious games with various genres for teaching information security courses and evaluate their effectiveness as an efficient teaching tool. The study also determines which game genre is the most suitable for delivering educational contents. The obtained results proved and confirmed the hypothesis that educational games have a positive impact as a pedagogic tool on the educational process. According to users preferences', action/adventure game genre is the most preferred game genre followed by role-play.