SBIR Phase I: Tablecraft, A Next Generation Introductory STEM Platform

This SBIR Phase I project is dedicated to creating a whole-classroom virtual reality (VR) experience for middle school students to be exposed to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) topics interactively as a supplement to the existing curriculum. While immersed in their very own 3D virtual treehouse lab, students will be able to join other student labs and collaboratively explore a variety of Next Generation Science Concepts, such as the Periodic Elements and their properties. This is facilitated by a teacher-oriented desktop and VR interface that makes it possible to manage an entire class of students simultaneously participating in VR activities. By leveraging the use of affordable standalone VR headsets, and elevating VR beyond its current one-student-at-a-time use case, the project will be pioneering the highly anticipated market of virtual field trips for use in authentic learning environments. This is aligned with the National Science Foundation's Education Research Area, which seeks to achieve excellence in U.S. STEM education at all levels in all settings, because the value of classroom-VR rests on its unique ability to provide more effective learning settings to more students. What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity? The project team will develop an immersive multiplayer virtual reality (VR) learning game for authentic classroom usage. The project will apply the advantages of a modular game design built around self-directed goals to test a classroom-management system built to allow an entire class of students to collaborate in or outside virtual reality. While immersed in individual 3D virtual environments, students will be able to join virtual spaces belonging to other students, in order to accomplish shared goals set by the teacher at a class level. The project also seeks to further the general field of learning games, by applying the Universal Design for Learning framework to its local goal of enhancing middle-schoolers' relationships to and content knowledge of STEM topics. This permits the project to be a test-bed for educational VR content design and interaction schemes. In Phase I research, the project team will examine whether students are able to understand how to play the game with minimal or no external help, whether teachers can integrate the product with their classroom environment, how large of a group a teacher can manage while keeping students on-task, whether student relationships to the subject matter change, and whether teachers and students see the fully realized product as a potentially effective learning tool. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.