ACM TechNews
$1.8 Million Grant to Expand IU School of Education Professor's Immersive Learning Project Worldwide
Indiana University (02/25/08)
The Indiana University School of Education has been awarded a three-year,
$1.8 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
to expand the reach of professor Sasha Barab's Quest Atlantis project,
which offers students between the ages of 9 and 12 a 3D multiuser immersive
learning environment. Barab's system allows players to employ tactics they
might also use in commercial games on lessons from educational research on
learning and motivation, and travel to virtual destinations to conduct
educational activities, where they can communicate with other users and
mentors and construct virtual personas. Quest Atlantis is currently used
in the United States, China, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia,
Turkey, and Singapore, and at the end of three years Barab expects tens of
thousands of people worldwide to be using the environment, compared to
5,000 now. Barab says in an interview that the MacArthur grant "allows us
... to kind of enter that game, to bring up the quality of our software, to
bring up the quality of our storylines, and then ultimately to show to the
commercial industry that you can actually develop a space that will not be
used by five or 600 because no budget's going to allow that, but by 30 to
40,000 kids worldwide." He points out that Quest Atlantis does not operate
separately from the educator, and that the teacher's role is to collect
data and make decisions on how to function in virtual environments. Barab
says that Quest Atlantis' expansion to many more students throughout the
world can help facilitate a transformation in learning acquisition
techniques, so that children can "become critical creators, not just simply
consumers of information that they're taught not to question."
http://site.educ.indiana.edu/news_detail/tabid/10308/Default.aspx/xmid/13a
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