SBIR Phase I: Online, Virtual Classroom Environment for Science Education

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I research project proposes the development of a novel interactive educational platform, which draws on the popular formats of online gaming and social networking to teach science to middle-school and high-school students. This platform, termed 'pi-space', would complement textbooks and other traditional materials with an online, interactive format. pi-space combines active learning components such as simulated experiments, interactive games, and quizzes with online lectures and reference material. The pi-space environment will be structured as a virtual world with a number of 'classrooms' devoted to specific areas of the science education standard. The work during this component of the project will focus the initial development of the platform on physics, which is a particularly challenging subject to teach to students. In this proposed SBIR Phase I, the virtual world will be designed, and a demonstration module of the virtual world will be produced. The competitors for the technology to be developed in this proposal include textbooks, standalone educational games, and existing online virtual worlds which have been adapted to education. pi-space is innovative in that it will be an integral part of the classroom experience, designed to cover the standard high-school physics curriculum in an interactive and engaging way. The customer for the product will be public and private high schools, of which there are over 40,000 in the US. The product will be provided to the user as a service, with a per-student subscription fee of around $50 per year (less than the cost of a typical textbook). If this project is successful, the product will be profitable and will help advance STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education in the United States.