Abstracts Education

Towards a Design Framework for Adaptable Reconfigurable Virtual Learning Environments

by Michiel Smuts

Technology is giving us new ways to interact with our world and this offers us unprecedented access to knowledge. To benefit from this access, we may need new ways to interact with subject matter, and it may be helpful to match the affordances of technology to the learning affordances of our minds. One possible approach to this problem is to leverage our natural environmental awareness. Humans are a successful species because we adapt so well to our environment, and adaptation is the focus of this research, which uses computer science to design a language teaching tool. The research is intended to further the development of virtual reality teaching environments by proposing a design framework created to manage changes in a virtual world. Subsequently, a virtual world based on the framework was created, and used to teach a language concept, the English preposition “over”. A serious game created on two platforms, one PC, and the other Virtual Reality, was used to deliver the teaching challenges based on the different meanings of the preposition, and tests before and after the use of the game were used to measure improvements in learning outcomes. The PC game had both an adaptive and static environment, and the VR game had an adaptive environment. The research found that the VR game resulted in the strongest effect on learning outcomes. The VR environment challenge which used a “sorting” mechanic resulted in a statistically significant change in test scores as did the “ordering” mechanic in the PC Static environment. Both had a medium effect on scores. The research also found that the actions taken inside the environments were not affected by profile differences such as age, gender, English proficiency, or role. The test scores for the meanings “Cover”, “Excess”, and “Temporal”, all showed improvement in post-test scores, however, the effect size was small, and not likely to be significant. Further study comparing Static VR platforms with adaptive VR platforms as well as mechanic-specific research is needed.