Opening up a whole new world of ways to educate

Nov 5 2009 by Andrew Mernin, The Journal

A NORTH university has teamed up with two Japanese institutions to investigate the way in which virtual worlds could play a role in education.

Teesside University is working alongside Japan’s Future University and Yokohama National University (YNU) to research how virtual environments such as Second Life can be used to create new ways of teaching.

As part of the ongoing research Japanese students Yumi Kato, Nao Kubo, Ryosuke Ichikawa and Eric Choi paid a recent visit to Teesside University.

The Japanese students worked alongside four Teesside postgraduate students on an activity designed show how they devised strategies and solutions to problems – with this information then used by the research team to establish measures of effective learning.

Stewart Martin, a principal lecturer and head of education and Professor Paul van Schaik, both from the university’s School of Social Sciences & Law, secured British Council Funding through the prime minister’s initiative along with Michael Vallance of Future University and Charles Wiz from YNU.

During the activity one group had the task of communicating details electronically to the second group on how to programme a robot. The second group, which was in a separate location, then had to manoeuvre the robot around a complicated maze which the first group had built. Second Life was used by both groups to communicate, learn and teach.

Mr Martin said: “We are especially interested in how people collaborate so that we can develop methods to evaluate learning in Second Life.

“This kind of research is of great interest to teachers and also to those working in engineering, robotics and science education”.