From classroom to metaverse: a study on gamified constructivist teaching in higher education
Ng, Peter HF, Chen, Peter Q, Sin, Zackary PT, Jia, Ye, Li, Richard Chen, Baciu, George, Cao, Jiannong, Li, Qing
International conference on web-based learning 2023 (2023)
In the rapidly evolving educational landscape, the integration of metaverse and gamification is emerging as a revolutionary approach. This paper presents the Gamified Constructivist Teaching in the Metaverse (GCTM) framework, aiming to enhance engagement and satisfaction in the computer science education domain. Implemented in two engineering classes using the metaverse platform, the GCTM model, with its unique combination of game world design, rule design, roleplay, mission assignments, and evaluation, demonstrated promising results in enhancing student-lecturer interactions. Feedback indicated a stronger sense of belonging among students in the virtual environment compared to conventional platforms like ZOOM or MS Teams. The findings underscore the potential of GCTM in transforming the educational experience, suggesting a significant stride towards a more interactive and learner-centric approach in the metaverse-driven educational era.
NivTA: Towards a Naturally Interactable Edu-Metaverse Teaching Assistant for CAVE
Jia, Ye, Sin, Zackary P. T., Wang, Xiangzhi Eric, Li, Chen, Ng, Peter H. F., Huang, Xiao, Dong, Junnan, Wang, Yaowei, Baciu, George, Cao, Jiannong, Li, Qing
2024 IEEE International Conference on Metaverse Computing, Networking, and Applications (MetaCom) (2024)
Edu-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.