Virtual Field Trips: Synthetic Experiences and Learning

This demonstration involves discussion on, and interaction with, the outcome of a recent project headed by Dr. Janis Cannon-Bowers at the University of Central Florida. We will demonstrate our “Virtual Field Trip” interactive software that was designed to provide exposure to, and experience with, real-world contexts for grade school students. This effort focused on developing innovative teaching approaches and methods both to address the problems faced by Florida’s educational system, and also as a means to leverage Central Florida’s unique talents in the MS&T and entertainment industries. This project sought to utilize advanced, interactive dynamic media approaches in classroom-based settings to produce a technology-enhanced classroom environment that is more effective in teaching targeted material and also more motivating to students. While there are any number of subjects or domains that could benefit from interactive teaching approaches, we opted to focus initially on reading skills for reasons described below. Our goal with this demonstration is to share with the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society community a means of more fully expanding their research and development base into K-12 education research. Recent advances in the use of technology to build environments that are psychologically valid (e.g., virtual environments, high fidelity motion, environmental and visual models, high-end graphics) have dramatically increased designers’ ability to create learning environments centered around the principles of experiential learning and anchored instruction. We use the term synthetic experience to describe the outcome of such efforts; that is, synthetic experience is created deliberately and artificially in learners to replace, augment, accelerate, or broaden their actual experience in the world. For example, the fields of modeling, simulation and training and digital media both seek to exploit simulation technology to create a human experience through the presentation of a story or scenario. These stories or scenarios are typically delivered using advanced digital media to create a rich multi-modal (e.g., auditory, visual) experience that is not possible in a uni-directional presentation mode. This demonstration will show how we have leveraged the skills and technologies emerging from the military training communities to create “proof-ofconcept” learning tool for use in grade school reading curricula. We first describe the specific problem being addressed and then briefly describe the pedagogy and development behind our Virtual Field Trip project.