Learning by Playing An Edutainment 3D Environment for Schools

SEE (concerning “Dead Sea Scrolls” and related issues such as history, religion, philosophy, literature, etc.), is a very effective learning environment intended for a worldwide audience, of students from 12 to 19 years of age. A massive experimental-delivery phase during spring 2003 (involving more than 700 students and 40 teachers, from Italian and Israeli schools) has shown an impressive educational impact, far beyond our own expectations. One of the most surprising findings has been the wide-range impact (from motivation, to organization of learning activities, to specific interest in the subject matter, etc.) and that the effect was felt far beyond the limit of the experience, in the sense that it propagated to other learning activities and it lasted long after the SEE experience was completed. The paper briefly describes SEE, at the heart of which lies a 3D world shared over the Internet. The core of the paper is the description of the remarkable educational benefits detected during the experimental delivery, and a tentative analysis of the possible causes explaining such effectiveness.