Proceedings of the SLACTIONS 2010 International Conference Life, imagination, and work using metaverse platforms

User Involvement in the Design of Educational Virtual Worlds

Ahmer Iqbal
University of Jyvskyl, P.O Box 35, 40014 University of Jyvskyl, Finland. Email: ahmer.a.iqbal@jyu.fi.

Tuula Nousiainen
University of Jyvskyl, P.O Box 35, 40014 University of Jyvskyl, Finland. Email: tuula.nousiainen@jyu.fi.

Marja Kankaanranta
University of Jyvskyl, P.O Box 35, 40014 University of Jyvskyl, Finland. Email: marja.kankaanranta@jyu.fi. There have been many attempts to create virtual worlds for education;however, rarely the input from end users that is, students, teachers and principals is taken into consideration while designing these educational virtual worlds. This paper presents the initial phases of a study in which the students, teachers and principals take active part and design educational virtual worlds by themselves with the help of researchers. The paper presents the results of an online survey which was conducted to gather background information about the participants and learn about their preferences for different subjects. They were also inquired about the skills that might be useful during the design process. Keywords: Virtual worlds; user-centered design; educational technology; design. In this paper we report on the progress of the project. In the first phase, in order to better understand the participant teachers and students in this project, we conducted an online survey. Results from this survey and outcomes from one workshop with students are presented in this paper. The future phases of the project will be composed of participatory teamwork in order to build the virtual world.

User Involvement in Educational Design

Norman and Spohrer (1996) characterise instruction in terms of three dimensions: engagement, effectiveness, and viability. According to them, engagement is related to motivation and is thus a crucial factor in determining the success or failure of accomplishing the desired learning outcomes. Effectiveness refers to how much the user learns with the aid of a certain method of instruction, while viability emphasizes the requirement that instructional tools (be they technological applications or other types of teaching methods) need to accommodate different kinds of conditions and boundaries set by the real world. Our goal is to build an educational virtual world for classroom use and to define and examine its design process. To be able to address the aforementioned requirements, the design process has to involve students, teachers, principals, and educational authorities alike. Each viewpoint weighs in the use and development of educational tools and interventions to ensure such solutions that are educationally valid, bring added value to current teaching practices, are feasible and efficient in the schools everyday lives, and motivate the students (cf. Norman & Spohrer, 1996).
Teachers, who carry out instruction in practice, are naturally key players: the solutions should provide them with novel practices that are versatile yet not complicated to adopt, and they must not increase their workload. Also, as

Introduction
Virtual worlds have gained attention of educationists as a platform to foster education in formal and informal settings. Many attempts have been made to use already existing Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) virtual worlds in educational settings while others have tried to construct holistic educational virtual worlds, for example Quest Atlantis and RiverCity. Both approaches of using virtual worlds in education have shown promising results.
The end users of such environments are mostly teachers and students, but their active participation in the design process is often not ensured. In this project, we are attempting to create a holistic educational virtual world with active participation from principals, teachers and students.

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Proceedings of the SLACTIONS 2010 International Conference Life, imagination, and work using metaverse platforms

course schedules are often very tight, firm curriculum focus is necessary and the solutions should be able to convince teachers that they can achieve curricular goals by using them (e.g. Good & Robertson, 2006; Rode et al., 2003). Students, on the other hand, are the experts to say what engages and interests them. The capability to respond to the needs of different learners, to match a vast range of learning styles, and to actively engage the learners is becoming all the more important in school instruction (e.g. Dunn & Dunn, 1993; Kolb, 1984; Norman & Spohrer, 1996). In addition to students and teachers who directly use the solutions, the involvement of the principals is vital in order to ensure commitment on the school level. On an even more general level, educational authorities set their boundaries and contribute to determining the foci of any educational design efforts. The generalisability and eventual distributability of any instructional tool or intervention is tightly related to the extent to which the solution is able to address the curriculum as a whole (e.g. Good & Robertson, 2006; Norman & Spohrer, 1996; Rode et al., 2003).

What is especially difficult to reach is the design participants feeling of ownership over the outcome. This is particularly true when it comes to children, as children need a more concrete, hands-on experience of their own contribution (Nousiainen, 2008). Hence, it is worth applying some ideas from certain disciplines with a specific focus on empowerment (Figure 1), such as childhood sociology (e.g. Francis & Lorenzo, 2002; Kiili, 2006), child-centred pedagogy (e.g. Chung & Walsh, 2000), and the growing phenomenon of user-created content particularly in games and social media (e.g. Kafai, 2006; OECD, 2007; Robertson & Nicholson, 2007). In these views the emphasis is, respectively, on the involvement of children and young people in decision-making; seeing children as involved actors in their own learning, directing their own activities; and allowing the users to create something concrete to be shared with others. Our goal is not only to make the final outcome of the project (i.e. an educational virtual world) meet all the aforementioned requirements of educational tools, but also to build its development process in such a way that it serves as a versatile learning experience in itself. Previous research has suggested that participation in a technology design project can be a valuable learning process, teaching not only content area issues but also e.g. general learning skills, design skills, and social skills (Druin, 1999; Nousiainen, 2008). We aim to support design-related learning by allowing the participants to work in a variety of ways to contribute to the outcome. The teams will focus on different themes which will allow them to use and develop their verbal, visual and technological skills alike. There are also plans to tie this project together, to some extent, with another project which deals with developing tools for mobile learning. The aim is to explore the ways in which virtual worlds and mobile devices or applications might support and complement each other, and how their potential interplay (e.g. through augmented reality) could be experimented with in educational contexts.

Framework for User Involvement in Educational Technology Design

Due to the multifaceted nature of educational design and the various stakeholder groups whose requirements need to be equally attended to, in our approach we employ a multidisciplinary framework of involving users in the process of developing educational technology (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The multidisciplinary view to user involvement (adapted from Nousiainen 2008, 168)

As the figure illustrates, there are several complementary views to bringing users input into the process. From the viewpoint of technology design, on the one hand, these include the different dimensions of user involvement (e.g. Kujala, 2003), the concept of child-computer interaction (e.g. Read, 2005), and the learner-centred design approach (Good & Robertson, 2006; Rode et al., 2003). These views represent the fields of human-computer interaction, developmental psychology (i.e. taking into account the attention spans and cognitive skills of children of a certain age), and educational sciences (to ensure the pedagogical feasibility of the products and the design process alike).

On the whole, the design activities of the project will be structured as an iterative process. On a general level, it follows the basic idea of the human-centred design cycle (ISO 13407, 1999), where both the requirements and the design outcomes become more and more refined with each iteration. However, it has been pointed out that, in practice, user-centred design often places users in a position in which they are merely reactors to suggested solutions (e.g. Scaife et al., 1997). To address this problem, we have adopted a view which allows the users to concretely create something new in the course of the process. Currently we are in the early phases of the first iteration. The survey results presented in this paper intend to provide us with information on the context of use and the contentrelated requirements on the most general level.

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Proceedings of the SLACTIONS 2010 International Conference Life, imagination, and work using metaverse platforms

Methods
In the first phase of the project, an online survey was conducted at participating schools to gather general data about skills, interests and use of computers from teachers and students. The survey results were intended to inform us about the themes and topics that would be suitable starting points for the development of the virtual world and to provide background information for building teams for the design activities. The survey was filled in the computer labs of the schools under the supervision of teachers. The students were asked about their liking for different subjects taught at school. Participants were also inquired about different skills that will be necessary in the design and development phase of the project, such as story writing, drawing on paper and on computer, animating, 3D modeling, programming and making videos. They were also asked about their free-time activities: movies, games, web surfing and blogging. The survey comprised of personal questions as well: name, age, school and grade. Moreover, as the first step in the mobile perspective, we conducted a mobile learning workshop where a class of 13to-14-year-old students from one of the participant schools brainstormed ideas for the use of mobile technology in different school subjects. The aim was to find out two things: firstly, which school subjects the students saw as particularly suitable for mobile learning, and secondly, in what types of ways they were interested in using mobile devices and applications in said subjects. Figure 2: Most liked subjects (percentage) The skills that participants had tried and they felt they were good at were storytelling and story writing (43 %), drawing on paper (42%) and photography and photo editing (34%). Storytelling is crucial for the design of virtual worlds because it is related to the creation of several elements of virtual worlds, such as setting, structure, theme, characters and dialogue (Hardnett 2010). These elements can be present to varying degrees, depending on the type of the virtual world and the activities within it (e.g. heavy focus on quests or tasks vs. more unstructured exploration). Drawing is a basic element in design activities in general. Besides being directly related to the sketching of the visual aspects of the virtual world, drawing also possesses other qualities that make it a useful technique especially with children: it is a familiar activity, generally considered fun, and easy and inexpensive to carry out (e.g. Hart, 1997). Similarly, photography and photo editing are related to the visual design of the different elements of the virtual world. An interesting advantage of photography, as opposed to drawing, is also the notion that children are aware that photographs are often valued in the everyday of the adult world (e.g. in newspapers, books etc.), which may enhance their feeling of their ideas being taken seriously in the design process (Clark & Moss, 2001).
On the other hand, fewer students felt that they possessed skills related to the implementation of virtual worlds. Two percent stated being good in 3D modeling and four percent in programming. However, as the project will at first mainly deal with the design phase of a virtual world, the design-related skills and interests are of greater significance.

Results and their Implications

The online survey was completed by 281 respondents of two schools in Central Finland. Out of those, 56 were higher secondary students and 225 were lower secondary students. Most of the students (268 participants) were between 13 and 16 years of age. The students were asked about their liking for different subjects (Figure 2). The subjects that were most liked were physical education / sports (69% liked it), home economics (58%), history (51%), visual arts (41%), music (41%), and crafts (41%). However, the subjects that were disliked most were Swedish (secondary language) (45% disliked it), physics (30%), religion (28%), chemistry (24%) and mathematics (22%). The participants were also asked about different skills that might be useful during the design and development phase of the project. The skills that they were inquired about included story writing and storytelling, drawing (on paper and on the computer), animating, making and editing videos, making 3D models, photography, programming, making websites, blogging, and making music. Each of these skills or interests is relevant to the project either in the design phase or in the implementation phase.

The mobile perspective already had its first workshop (due to being related also to another project). The themes of the workshop dealt with preferred school subjects to be enhanced with mobile solutions and the ways of using mobile devices in these subjects.
In terms of the preferred school subjects, the mobile workshop suggested similar things as the online survey. The class worked in six groups, and history was the only subject mentioned by all groups. Sport, geography, and music were

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Proceedings of the SLACTIONS 2010 International Conference Life, imagination, and work using metaverse platforms

each mentioned by all groups but one. In terms of technological ideas, the use of location-aware applications in various subjects was mentioned several times, as well as using and making user-created content (e.g. in the form of wikis).
The results provided the essential background information for taking decisions about the subjects for which the virtual world shall be designed and it helped in forming different working teams for the design process. It was decided, in consultations with the principals, teachers and researchers that in the initial phase of the project one course from history, foreign language (English) and physical education / sports each will be implemented. Physical education / sports and history were among the most liked subjects whereas the English teacher already has some experience in using Second Life for education. It was also decided to find ways for student counseling using virtual worlds.

Good, J. & Robertson, J. (2006). CARSS: A framework for learner-centred design with children. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 16 (4), 381-413. Hardnett, C.R. 2010. Virtual World Design and Creation for Teens. Boston: Course Technology. Hart, R.A. 1997. Childrens participation: the theory and practice of involving young citizens in community development and environmental care. London: Earthscan Publications. ISO 13407. (1999). Human-centred design processes for interactive systems. Geneve: International Organization for Standardization. Kafai, Y. B. (2006). Playing and making games for learning: instructionist and constructionist perspectives for game studies. Games and Culture 1 (1), 36-40. Kiili, J. (2006). Lasten osallistumisen voimavarat. Tutkimus Ipanoiden osallistumisesta. (Resources for childrens participation.) Jyvskyl Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research 283.
Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential Learning, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Currently we are in the process of making teams for the design phase which will be based on the results about the skills of the participants.

Future Directions
In the next phase, the designing of the educational virtual world in Second Life will occur in which principals, teachers, students and researchers will participate. In later phases, the designed virtual worlds will be developed and tested in school context. Moreover, in the subsequent mobile workshops we will further elaborate on the ideas related to ways of linking mobile applications and activities to the use of virtual worlds. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank the schools and their students for taking part in the study. The mobile perspective is related to the project Personal Mobile Space, funded by Tekes (The Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation). REFERENCES
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Clark, A. & Moss, P. 2001. Listening to young children: the

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Mosaic approach. London: National Childrens Bureau. Druin, A. (1999). Cooperative inquiry: developing new technologies for children with children. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. New York: ACM, 592599. Dunn, R. & Dunn, K. (1993). Teaching secondary students through their individual learning styles: Practical approaches for grades 7-12. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Francis, M. & Lorenzo, R. (2002). Seven realms of childrens participation. Journal of Environmental Psychology 22 (1-2), 157169.

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