Observation-Based Inquiry in a Virtual Ambient Environment

Design rationale and user experience are described for a virtual ambient environment designed to support sixth grade students' learning of simple co-occurrence relationships and systematic observational skills. User experience was characterized by enthusiasm, but with significant data loss and navigational difficulties. Design implications and further extensions of virtual ambient environments are suggested. A second, complementary, problem—and our focus in this paper—derives from the very richness of the real world. Even a small slice of the world offers nearly unlimited opportunity for observation. With so many phenomena to choose among, heavy-handed intervention may be needed to channel inquiries in the direction of learning content goals. Moreover, data derived from the real world can be messy, sometimes to the extent that it obscures the very relationships the activity is intended to uncover. These problems—accessibility and complexity—are often addressed through the use of simulations. Simulations can provide access to otherwise inaccessible phenomena, and simulations afford a great deal of control over which abstractions to feature and the mathematical properties of the data derived from the simulation. Most simulations designed to support inquiry and discovery learning provide users with control over a set of independent variables and access to the resulting impact on one or more dependent variables (e.g., Friedler, et al., 1990; deJong, et al., 1999). Learners literally create the phenomena of interest; the challenge is to provide the scaffolding (Guzdial, 1995) that will help them to plan and conduct a meaningful investigation. In this paper, we describe the design and pedagogical context for a different style of simulation, intended to support children's understanding of the earliest phases of scientific inquiry: systematic observation, data collection,