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Education
2 items tagged with “Education”
Publications
- NivTA: Towards a Naturally Interactable Edu-Metaverse Teaching Assistant for CAVEEdu-metaverse is a specialized metaverse dedicated for interactive education in an immersive environment. Its main purpose is to immerse the learners in a digital environment and conduct learning activities that could mirror reality. Not only does it enable activities that may be difficult to perform in the real world, but it also extends the interaction to personalized and CL. This is a more effective pedagogical approach as it tends to enhance the motivation and engagement of students and it increases their active participation in lessons delivered. To this extend, we propose to realize an interactive virtual teaching assistant called NivTA. To make NivTA easily accessible and engaging by multiple users simultaneously, we also propose to use a CAVE virtual environment (CAVE-VR) as a "metaverse window" into concepts, ideas, topics, and learning activities. The students simply need to step into the CAVE-VR and interact with a life-size teaching assistant that they can engage with naturally, as if they are approaching a real person. Instead of text-based interaction currently developed for large language models (LLM), NivTA is given additional cues regarding the users so it can react more naturally via a specific prompt design. For example, the user can simply point to an educational concept and ask NivTA to explain what it is. To guide NivTA onto the educational concept, the prompt is also designed to feed in an educational KG to provide NivTA with the context of the student’s question. The NivTA system is an integration of several components that are discussed in this paper. We further describe how the system is designed and implemented, along with potential applications and future work on interactive collaborative edu-metaverse environments dedicated for teaching and learning.
- Enhance Learner Engagement ThroughExperiential Learning in a Gamified Simulation:A Longitudinal StudyExperiential learning in virtual reality (VR) has gained con-siderable attention from both practitioners and researchers in recentyears. Despite its potential, there is still a gap in effectively engagingstudents through experiential learning. Gamification has emerged as apromising strategy to bridge this gap by incorporating interactive andmotivational elements into learning experiences. To explore the poten-tial of combining gamification with experiential learning in VR, we con-ducted a longitudinal study with 68 undergraduate students enrolled ina human-computer interaction (HCI) course. The study focused on agamified simulation of Fitts’ Law, a fundamental concept for modellinghuman movement in HCI, to evaluate its impact on learner engagementand the translation of this engagement into knowledge gains over boththe short and long term. Our findings indicated that the gamified ex-periential learning approach significantly enhanced learner engagement,especially affective engagement, compared to traditional methods thatrely on texts and figures. The longitudinal data also suggested that theapproachledtobetterknowledgeretention.However,norelationshipwasfound between the observed learner engagement and knowledge change.This highlights the need for further research to study how to effectivelyconvert learner engagement into measurable knowledge gains throughexperiential learning in gamified simulations.