Exploring the Instruction of Fluid Dynamics Concepts in an Immersive Virtual Environment: A Case Study of Pedagogical Strategies

The deployment of immersive, non-restrictive environments for instruction and learning presents a new set of challenges for instructional designers and educators. Adopting the conceptual frameworks of Sherin’s (2002) learning while teaching and Vygotsky’s (1978) cultural development via the mediation of tools, this paper explores one professor’s pedagogical approaches used for instructing fluid dynamics concepts within the Metaverse, a highly innovative, physically immersive visualization display that does not require the use of headmounted or other restrictive devices. Introduction The emergence of virtual realities (VR) in the educational technology landscape in recent years has aroused the enthusiasm of instructional designers and educators, especially among instructors in the discipline of science. Virtual reality technologies enable a new dimension of representing difficult scientific concepts and processes that 2-D desktop graphical representations have not been able to offer (Jimoyiannis & Komis, 2001; Fiolhais & Trindale, 1998). However, integrating these burgeoning technologies into school curriculum and higher education presents a new set of challenges within the realms of learning and instruction (Barajas & Owen, 2000). In the past decade, a plethora of discussions and inquiries in educational technology journals and conference proceedings have placed significant emphasis on various aspects of simulated desktop virtual environments, 2-D multimedia representations and web-based instruction and learning (Davies, 2002; Antonietti & Cantoia, 2000; Maher & Corbit, 2002; Gabrielli, S., Rogers, Y., & Scaife, M. 2000; Gazit, E., & Chen, D., 2003). Moreover, empirical studies on the applications and implementations of immersive, nondesktop virtual reality interfaces in education, especially scalable virtual reality infrastructures are scant (Crosier, Cobb, & Wilson, 2002). To this end, the Metaverse, a NSF-funded interdisciplinary research project at the University of Kentucky, has marked a milestone in the development of educational technologies. In addition to developing self-configuring, scalable visual displays, the Metaverse makes it possible for learning and instruction in a commodity hardware supported immersive, non-restrictive environment. The objectives are to support meaningful human-computer interaction and to understand the impact these visual environments have on education. For the past three years, the Metaverse team has been translating, designing and implementing prototype instructional materials into immersive displays. One of the preeminent tasks that the educators of the team face is to seek ways of facilitating instruction in this dynamic, non-linear teaching and learning environment. Many initial questions arise. Chief among them, for example, is how can teachers learn to use an immersive environment in which developing their own understanding of the nature of the new computergenerated 3-D environment is of primal concern? As McLellan (2003) pointed out, careful and continual examination of virtual reality technologies, especially within the context of learning and instruction are important for two reasons: 1) virtual reality technologies are still in their nascent stage of development as a category in educational technologies, and 2) rapid technological improvement posts concerns for the issue of outdated technological capabilities. Thus, the purpose of this exploratory study was to analyze the emerging pedagogical strategies within a non-restrictive, immersive environment. More specifically, this study examined the teaching approaches employed by a professor in the instruction of fluid dynamics concepts using in the Metaverse display. Using Sherin’s (2002) concept of “teaching while learning” and Vy gotsky’s (1978) notion of “cultural development” through the mediation of tools, this paper seeks to understand the instructor’s integration of subject matter knowledge and his newly acquired knowledge in deploying the immersive technology. The goals are to: a) shed some light on the development of effective instruction, b) to optimize the full potential that this inherently