Virtually There: Emerging Designs for

Four research projects used Second LifeTM, a 3D virtual-world platform, to investigate aspects of technology-enhanced STEM education. These European and USA studies, which differ in their pedagogical-philosophy commitments, theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and target content, critically examine a range of cognitive, affective, technical, and social factors pertaining to the prospects of students’ and teachers’ successful engagement with immersive microworlds. Specifically, each project describes students’ successes and challenges in creating complex virtual artifacts and collaborating in real time with peers and the broader community. The design-based research studies of mathematical and computational literacy present sample student artifacts and discuss the learning they evidence. Collectively, we posit that overcoming the following obstacles could make virtual worlds both effective and exciting learning environments: professional development (technical skill, affective disposition), collaboration with school systems (logistics of access, allocation of resources), alignment with targeted content (harnessing students’ creative divergence), and initial learning curves (issues of teacher-to-student ratio). Overview of Symposium Panel Recent technological developments have created opportunities for education researchers to evaluate the prospects of virtual worlds as arenas for facilitating STEM designs. Motivating factors for utilizing this new medium include its plasticity—it could potentially augment traditional learning environments by immersing learners in accessible reconstructions of real, confabulated, or hybrid loci that are remote in place, time, and/or scale, such as foreign lands complete with their geographical features, ancient archeological sites that come to life, sophisticated laboratories for safe handling of any contraptions and chemicals, microscopic organisms enlarged a million-fold, or galaxies reduced to neighborhoods. Yet as with any excitement created by “cool” technology, comes the sobering research-based acknowledgment that education practice must adapt prudently so as to assimilate the media in ways that best serve students. This symposium presents findings from a total of four European/USA research projects that study cognitive and affective factors contributing to students’ and teachers’ development of mathematical and computational literacy. Varying across participants, pedagogical commitments, theoretical frameworks, and methodology, the projects have in common a utilization and critical examination of the 3D virtual world as a medium for implementing designs for teaching and learning STEM content. Also, all of the learning environments were developed within the virtual worlds (Teen) Second Life (SL/TSL) (Linden Research, 2007). Finally, all projects seek to provide contexts that leverage students’ natural social inclinations, cater to a broad spectrum of initial capacity and idiosyncratic interests, position mathematics and/or computer-science content as conducive to the solution of suggested or emergent authentic problems, and provide formative-assessment infrastructure (cf. Barab, et al., 2007). Briefly, each project is described below: !" Morgado and Esteves explore SL as a platform for teaching and learning introductory computer programming in Computer Science (CS) undergraduate courses. The main focus was transposing programming concepts and evaluating teacher and student needs by using an iterative action-research process. Morgado and Esteves describe how observations of unanticipated events led to parallel small-scale inquiry-based research efforts. !" Veeragoudar Harrell and Abrahamson are conducting design-based research on critical-pedagogy frameworks, computational literacy, intellectual identity, and mathematical agency. Their project, Fractal Village, is an experimental unit in which at-risk student participants learn core computer science concepts and mathematical reasoning through collaboratively constructing a community within a virtual world. !" Valcke, Vansteenbrugge, and Veeragoudar Harrell describe the Second Life Impact on Beliefs and Anxiety study, which utilizes a richly social and visually interactive graphical environment to support and investigate student–teacher development of conceptual/procedural knowledge and affective disposition toward mathematical content. !" Rosenbaum reports on Scratch for Second Life (S4SL), an innovative interface that lowers the barrier for creating interactive, dynamic content in Second Life by enabling users to program SL objects using a graphical building-block language (Maloney et al., 2004). Our collective preliminary findings in these ongoing projects attest to the potential of these immersive learning tools to create opportunities for students to engage creatively with STEM content. We have witnessed multiple entry points to collaborative learning with students sharing resources, communicating, and even selling objects they created. However, we all still face serious implementation challenges due to issues of coordinating platforms, access to technology, professional development, and teacher-to-student ratio demands. The symposium will begin with a 5-minute introduction by the chair. Each of the four ensuing 14-minute presentations will report major findings, demonstrate the content learned, and respond to audience questions. Thereafter, we will have a 14-minute participatory component in which attendees will be invited to personally interact with any of the technologies. The symposium will close with a 15-minute critical summation by our discussant, Dr. Sasha Barab (IU), a leading design-based researcher with particular expertise in online environments. Abstracts of Panel Participants Second Life for Teaching and Learning Introductory Computer Programmings of Panel Participants Second Life for Teaching and Learning Introductory Computer Programming Leonel Morgado and Micaela Esteves A substantial amount of research has been conducted on teaching & learning introductory programming. A recent worldwide analysis (Schulte & Bennedsen, 2006) focused on themes and challenges of learning CS content, in particular as perceived by teachers: programming is a difficult subject to learn, typically taught using traditional programming paradigms; major hurdles include basic topics such as parameters, references, and pointers; typical teaching focuses on language specifics and coding, albeit design topics are also expected to be learned; teachers are ambitious, expecting students to master at a high level about 80% of the topics; and students are not equipped for tackling problems demanding high-level abstraction. Other approaches focus on issues such as motivational elements (e.g., Leutenegger & Edgington, 2007) or the theoretical perspective of CS instruction (East, 2006). These challenges team to hinder the professional and academic progress of CS students, as repeatedly reflected in reports of CS students cognitive struggle with programming content, negative affective disposition toward it, and consequential systematic avoidance of programming projects or career paths involving programming (Miliszewska & Tan, 2007). Research on teaching approaches to overcome these issues has provided recommendations, e.g.: provide students well-written code examples; analogies work well to illustrate unknown concepts (ibid). The study presented here aims to improve programming education, by attempting to combine various prior recommendations, namely to provide a graphically appealing environment that expresses students’ code without increasing its complexity, thus enabling the development of programming abstractions within a richer context, increasing the availability and participation of faculty in students’ projects, and enhancing real-time student cooperation. We report on unexpected yet significant observations on how SL’s culture and society impact students’ programming experience, motivation, and learning. Second Life as a programming environment SL programming is performed in Linden Scripting Language (LSL), which has C-style syntax and keywords (AA.VV., n.d.). 3D objects created in SL can receive scripts, executed concurrently. Each script has its own state-machine: programming is done by triggering events or responding to them (by environment interactions or programmatic components). The programmer defines the states of each state machine and how/when to change over. The language’s programming libraries include communication with external servers: e-mail, XML remote procedure calls, and HTTP support, which is being used extensively by many developers to supplement SL’s programmability with Web services hosted externally, and to use SL as an alternative interface to external services. Figure 1 presents a sample programming session: the avatar in the center has just created a sphere. On the left, the grayed section shows the sphere’s contents (currently, just one script, a “Hello, World” example). By double-clicking, that script was opened as another window (top right). The dotted lines emanating from the hands of the two avatars indicate that both are editing the same object--and indeed both can be programming it, even sharing the same code. Second Life to learn introductory computer programming One can consider two approaches to learning introductory computer programming using SL: (1) replace traditional languages and environments altogether by the SL environment and LSL code; and (2) use SL as a source of additional context for projects based on a traditional programming environments/languages. This report focuses on approach #1 (see below), but we have also pursued #2 on a small scale. Namely, we taught students participating in a course focusing on Windows application development in C# how to program SL objects to send e-mails. Emails were sent in two situations: when an avatar touched them, and when an avatar was detected within 2 meters. This SL program can be created in approximately 5 lines of code. For the full semester, the students developed a Windows-based marketing management application on “interested customers” and “potential customers,” but instead of using abstract made-up text files of data, they employed SL to generate e-mails with “real” data: whenever an avatar would touch an object, the action would be reported as an “interested customer”; when an avatar was detected within 2 meters, the action would be reported as a “potential customer". At the end of the semester, students responded to a feedback questionnaire regarding their experience. Figure 1. Collaborative SL programming. Preliminary findings For our research on teaching entirely within SL, we are following an action-research methodology. Two initial settings early in 2007 lasted one semester: Setting A included 5 beginners (1-year students), and Setting B included 4 somewhat more experienced students (2-year), who albeit familiar with programming concepts had no experience developing a semester-long project on their own (Esteves et al., 2006). Later in 2007, settings C and D further pursued this approach, but now participants filled-in a questionnaire on their perspective on programming before being given the option of electing SL as a development platform. The same questionnaire was filled-in by all other non-participant students of the same course, as a comparison measure between study and control groups. Preliminary results from these efforts indicate that students do not necessarily welcome the graphics richness of SL: most students do have a positive or neutral attitude towards it, but a minority dismisses it as “unserious,” “awkward,” or “complex.” Students learning how to program by programming physical interactions in SL (e.g., making a dog follow you and obey your voice commands) are typically motivated; and students who focused primarily on non-visible techniques such as data structures and string processing, and who benefited from the environment just for enhanced context and not as a source of feedback for programming behavior, did not seem to display any motivational advantage over students employing a traditional console-oriented (text-only) approach. Two unexpected events have impacted students’ engagement in setting B, as we now describe. A student received a proposal by an avatar in SL to buy his programming assignment, not as a violation of student conduct but as a sanctioned exchange of virtual commodities; another student received a professional proposal to provide SL programming services for a company. Scripting, we learned, is a marketable skill in SL even at an introductory level. By deploying our students in a publicly accessible virtual world, thus, we inadvertently exposed them to the powers of an authentic micro-economy, and these social forces serendipitously contributed to our students’ “on-thejob” engagement in developing the core skills targeted by our experimental unit. These unanticipated anecdotal experiences suggest a curious paradox. SL, a cutting-edge technologically advanced 3D immersive environment, may harbor opportunities for powerful “back to basics” learning of introductory programming, in terms both of content and context: content—SL coding employs simple devices and practices, without complex development environments or complex compiler errors and with immediate perceptual feedback; and context—beginners’ applications are quite similar in look and feel to experts’, as was the case in the days before graphical user interfaces, and programming is a marketable skill greatly valued by the SL community. At the same time, this virtual simplicity includes advanced elements such as concurrent execution, encapsulation, and non-programming interface elements (3D modeling), which still patently mark expert–novice differences. Whether, as a community of researchers, we will be able to build on the environment’s pedagogical opportunities and successfully address its inherent challenges for CS learners, is a question demanding further research. It Takes a Virtual Village: Transforming Urban-Youth Intellectual Agency Through Critical Computational Literacy Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell and Dor Abrahamson (http://edrl.berkeley.edu/projects/fv/) Gordon and Bridglall (2006) have articulated ‘affirmative development’ as a framework for educational activism. Fostering student agency, they emphasize, is core to this effort, particularly with respect to STEM content. Inspired by this call, we designed and implemented a critical/constructionist-pedagogy learning environment, Fractal Village (Veeragoudar Harrell & Abrahamson, 2007) that constitutes both an empirical environment for research on an emergent model of mathematical agency (Veeragoudar Harrell, 2007) and a potential means of fostering such agency. In Fractal Village, students interface through programming procedures to engage collaboratively in TSL-based imaginative construction activities. The purpose of the materials selected/built for this study was to create context for activities eliciting students’ generative themes (Freire, 1968) that the designers-asteachers could then reflexively and strategically match with mathematical concepts (e.g., variables, functions) and computer-science concepts (e.g., recursion, looping), such that students appropriate the STEM content apropos of tackling emergent construction problems identified and articulated by the students. Key research objectives are to: (1) study relations amongst cognitive, affective, material, technological, and social factors apparently contributing to mathematical agency (e.g., content knowledge, procedural/media fluency, discourse practices, and self-image); (2) delineate design principles for fostering mathematical agency; (3) implement within a school a sustainable criticalpedagogy program in collaboration with school leadership and personnel; and (4) investigate benefits and limitations of an exciting new technology. We are particularly interested in students’ navigation of the multiple identities that this medium evokes (Gee, 2003)—in the physical world, in the virtual world, and, crucially, in their liminal intersecting spaces (Zuiker, 2007)—and how these may be leveraged so as to support students who have not developed academic practices to find a new voice and, so doing, develop STEM fluencies in voicing their e-merging identities. We have found that ‘liminality’—a construct first coined by the anthropologist Victor Turner (1967) to depict psycho–social in-between spaces that cultures create for rites of passage (e.g., manhood, bereavement)— captures virtual worlds’ mixture of outlandish, programmatic, and transformative qualities that displace (Blikstein, in press) students, inviting them into cocoons that foster their change into empowered agents of their own prospects.