Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure (EPIC)

Visualize Education – SDSU Scope of Work

K-12 and undergraduate students are developing more sophisticated expectations for the realism of modeling and simulation in their course work. This is due primarily to increasingly more advanced realism being found in today's computer games.  Game development tools and rendering engines are now readily available with outstanding near-photo realistic quality and massive mult-user support.  With some insight and forethought, this technology may be leveraged within the K-12 and undergraduate curriculum to provide students added engagement for learning and increased motivation to better understand the complex systems represented by these realistic simulations.

The San Diego State University Education Center on Computational Science and Engineering (ECCSE) proposes to evaluate a small number of existing "off-the-shelf" development tools and prototypes that may offer the potential for advanced multi-user simulation-based learning experiences.  These tools to be evaluated will be selected from a list that includes:

Croquet

OGRE

Butterfly

Shockwave3D

Java3D

Web3D

Visual Studio w. OpenGL libraries

Python 3D

Our metrics of evaluation will consist of a project rubric based on issues such as ease of development, interface features, multi-user support, scalability, performance, cross-platform support, and whether they are open source or proprietary. Based on a brief but thorough initial assessment, a subset consisting of the most promising tools will be used to develop a small number of prototype lessons using educational 3D interactive computational models for K-12 and undergraduate instruction. These lessons will then be field-tested by K-12 teachers and undergraduate professors. We have had success already with university faculty through our Faculty Fellows program. At the K-12 level, the ECCSE will work directly with the City Heights Educational Collaborative to introduce these prototype lessons to students at Hoover High School, Monroe-Clark Middle School, and Rosa Parks Elementary School in the San Diego area. Outcomes of these field test experiences will be documented with surveys and video interviews.

The importance of facilitating opportunities to field-test these prototype lessons at the undergraduate level cannot be overemphasized. This is why we would also like to propose to support one faculty fellowship wherein an undergraduate professor is given release time and undergraduate student intern support to help with the appropriate application of these tools into the curriculum. These fellowships and internships would be available during summer 2005.

The results of lesson development and field experience will serve as the basis for two workshops to be offered in late summer or early fall, 2005. The goals of these workshops would be to:

• Share the results of our field tests,
• Demonstrate the capabilities of these tools for science and engineering education,
• Provide hands-on experience with some of these tools, and
• Provide insight into how students, K-12 educators, and university faculty members might use these tools in classes. 

From these workshops we expect to identify areas within the curriculum that necessitate the use of 3D interactive multi-user simulation environments. Based on these results, during the remainder of 2005 the prototype lessons will be modified and used as the basis for further development in order to demonstrate the important role played by multi-user simulation environments.