September 2006 — Features
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Educational Gaming :: All the Right MUVEs
River City
One of the leading educational MUVEs is the River City Project, a program created by a group of professors from several universities and implemented by about 60 teachers for 4,000 students in the US and Australia.
VIRTUAL REALITY In River City, students
must
gather data to determine the source of
a health crisis and then suggest a remedy.
To use River City, students in a classroom collaborate in teams of three, with every student using a PC linked to a LAN where River City has been installed. Each student controls an avatar placed in a simulated American river town in the late 1800s. The town is facing a health crisis, and the students’ goal is to find out why the residents of River City are getting sick and what can be done to help them. To that end, students can interact with residents, view archival photos from the Smithsonian Institute, and gather data with virtual tools such as microscopes and bug catchers, then they can share their findings with their teammates. If the teacher activates the chat feature, the student teams can interact with each other electronically. Students can also see the avatars of users from other schools, but for safety’s sake, the program allows them to communicate only with their classmates.
The story line grew out of work the program’s Harvard University (MA)- based development team did with teachers from Bostonarea schools. The teachers identified a key problem: They needed a way to help students understand how to identify a problem, create a hypothesis, then test it. The researchers took heed, and with River City, created a MUVE to address those concerns. The students’ first task is to gather data in order to understand what is causing the outbreak of illness. There are lots of ways to gather data. The students can move around the city, listening for clues such as a mosquito buzzing. They can go to the local hospital and see who has been admitted, with what symptoms and from what part of town. They can gather water and check it for bacteria, or collect mosquitoes and see where they are most prevalent. One key element of their investigation is interviewing River City residents, which means they must enter queries that will yield the data they need to work out a solution. In the end, after about 20 class periods (15 hours in all), the students each write a letter to the mayor of River City with advice on how to address the situation.
River City also offers a lot of biology and ecology content, chosen in accordance with the National Science Standards. The program uses three variations of simulated disease transmission: waterborne, airborne, and insect-borne. The three strands are coordinated with content about history, social interaction, and geographical factors so students have to deal with multiple causes and issues to arrive at the most appropriate remedy. Another focus of the River City curriculum is the development of collaborative skills, which is facilitated by having the students work in teams. In the final stage of the program, the teams compare their work to see the range of hypotheses and causal relationships that can be derived.
