Students at a Baltimore County high school this fall will explore the area surrounding Mount St. Helens in a vehicle that can morph from an aircraft to a car to a boat to learn about how the environment has changed since the volcano’s 1980 eruption. But they’ll do it all without ever leaving their Chesapeake High School classroom--they will be using a 3D Virtual Learning Environment developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) with the university’s Center for Technology Education. Researchers are deploying the environment, which was modeled after a state-of-the-art, 3D visualization facility at APL that was used for projects by the Department of Defense and NASA. The Virtual Learning Environment is the first of its kind in the nation. There’s not a lot of research that says this directly improves student achievement. We have a hunch that it does. But we do know that it improves student involvement. And it improves teacher involvement, as well.
Initial results showed that when students have interest in something, they are more willing and able to learn--and gaming is something that students are interested in. People can learn anything, but they have to be interested in it. There are people who can recite sports statistics for the past 10 years, because it’s something that they’re interested in. There we will work to develop other environments, and hope that eventually students will be able to create their own environment. The Virtual Learning Environment includes 10 high-definition, 72-inch TV monitors, arranged in two five-screen semicircles that allow students to interact with what they see on screen using a custom-designed digital switch and touch-panel controller. In an adjoining lab, 30 workstations, each outfitted with three interconnected monitors, will display the same environments, allowing lessons to be translated and understood on a team or a student basis.More information:
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