Thanks for your question, Arthur. One challenge that arises is how to best support teachers in guiding their students’ inquiry. As much of the action is happening through individual student in the virtual world, teachers have expressed concern about knowing where students are in the inquiry process, and knowing the kinds of support they may need next. We are paying a lot of attention to this as we test the curriculum and software in classrooms and have been collecting observations about the approaches that work and don’t work so that we can integrate suggestions and pictures of practice in our final professional development and teacher support materials. We also have ideas about how we might use log files to generate views of the student process for teachers to use in their instruction, so stay tuned!

Thank you. In a sense, our prior grant with EcoMUVE served as a pilot, in supporting students learning ecosystem science with an inquiry-based curriculum using virtual environments. A few of our teachers have used EcoMUVE for five or six years. With new teachers, we provide an in-depth teacher’s guide, meet with teachers for a few hours of training, and visit several times during the two-week curriculum to check in with teachers as well as to observe and collect data.

While the two-week curriculum is primarily student-centered and inquiry-based, teachers are asked to provide support and guidance around our understanding goals, including experimentation and investigation in ecosystems science, how to think about graphs over time and other data that they have collected, and different approaches to obtaining and evaluating evidence in ecosystems.

For EcoXPT, we are developing new curriculum materials and supports for teachers, some of which we are piloting in the next few weeks. And over the next year we will continue to develop and refine our teacher professional development.

For research purposes, we ask that students do not use EcoXPT outside of the classroom, though during class they collaborate extensively, as shown by some of the clips in the video.

Thanks for your interest! The short answer is that EcoXPT isn’t ready yet to add beta test classrooms, but you can e-mail us at <ecomuve@gse.harvard.edu> to let us know you’re interested.

Meanwhile, though, EcoMUVE is available as a free download through license from Harvard University. Visit our website, ecolearn.gse.harvard.edu, register, go to EcoMUVE and click resources to get the most recent version of the software, as well as the teachers’ guide and other materials. It runs on Mac and PC computers.

Arthur, thank you for your comment! Science4Us does use a virtual environment, however once the students engage and explore the topic, we explain the content with actual images and push aside the more cartoon nature of learning. Also, our offline activities range from working hands-on with true objects in the classroom to outdoor investigations.

Arthur, thank you for your question about EcoXPT. In our experience, when we bring students out into the real world after they have used the our virtual ecosystem, the students make more thoughtful observations and predictions, grounded by the background understanding about ecosystems that they have developed – including the non-obvious features that they can’t see in real life.

We also try to make sure to discuss with students the ways that EcoMUVE/EcoXPT is a model of a real ecosystem, and in what ways it is both similar and different to the real world. In a related research project, EcoMOBILE, we bring students on field trips to real ponds where they experience some of the complexities and variability of data collecting in the real world.

Thanks, Elliot! It’s exciting to bring these immersive virtual worlds to classrooms, and to facilitate students getting to engage in inquiry-based ecosystem investigations – well beyond what would be possible without the technology.