Title: Educational Infrastructure
for Simulators and Synthetic Worlds
Performer(s):
Robert Balzer
Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina Del Rey, CA 92092
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Cluster: ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES
Contact Information:
Phone: 310-822-1511
Fax: 310-823-6714
email: balzer@isi.edu
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1. Instructional Focus:
Content areas/topics: Will be driven by collaborations with other in CAETI program.
Process skills: Learning by doing, inquiry, interactive, project based.
2. Target Population: K-12; also possibly adult learners.
3. Summary Description: The performers will produce an educational infrastructure for Simulators and Synthetic Worlds. They will approach this incrementally by developing the infrastructure needed for a sequence of specific synthetic worlds (chosen to integrate into the development of other CAETI performers.) There will be yearly releases of an educational infrastructure for a particular Simulator or Synthetic World.
The performers are interested in developing an infrastructure which allows educators to incorporate existing simulators and synthetic worlds into their curriculum and allows students to effectively use them. Some features of this infrastructure are:
- scenario generators for creating driving scenarios and synthetic participants that cooperate of compete with the student (the synthetic participants can be given a range of capabilities to help or challenge students at varying skill levels),
- ability to capture student behavior for critique and analysis,
- control over the passage of synthetic time,
- ability to save and restore the state of an ongoing simulation,
- ability to explore and evaluate alternative courses of action.
4. Training and Staff Development:
- Teacher prerequisite skills/knowledge needed: General computer skills.
- Student prerequisite skills needed: General computer skills.
- Training needed/provided: There are three levels of support for our infrastructure:
- DODEA use of specific scenario generators. Training to use the high level language in which scenarios are specified should be a few hours.
- DODEA maintenance of the scenario generators. This is more problematic and will require personnel with knowledge and familiarity of compilers, translation tools, and Lisp.
- DODEA maintenance of the tools to build generators. The performers do not envision these tools being field maintained.
- Technical support needed/provided: None specified.
5. Technological Resources Needed: Expect delivered software to run in PC (486 or above). Minimal disk space for individual execution except for vendor Lisp executables. Performers need to be able to encapsulate the synthetic world or simulator being used (as an unmodified black box from a commercial vendor) so that they can mediate its data flows. Might be able to use existing package, but expect that they will have to build it themselves. Suggest this capability become a standard part of CAETI infrastructure.
6. Intended Outcomes:
Students: Students will be able to use to scenarios generated to more effectively understand the problems presented to them.
Teachers: Teachers will be able to generate scenarios specifically tailored to their needs and use these scenarios in their classrooms. They will be able to make educational decisions based on information supplied by the student tracking features of the program.
7. Instructional Time Required: Use of the scenarios would be incorporated into the curriculum as desired by the individual instructor.
8. Role of the Pilot Teacher(s): Teachers will be trained to use the scenario generator. They will then generate scenarios to be used in the instruction. They will provide feedback to the performers about the effectiveness of the learning taking place while the product is used; they will also provide feedback about the ease of preparing the scenarios.
9. Example(s) of the Use of this Product (Scenario):
A government teacher uses the scenario generator to build scenarios that expose students to the problem of making zoning decisions within the synthetic world of a mid-size city. Students use the synthetic world infrastructure to run those scenarios. The teacher then evaluates their performance through the captured behavior and prepares the next set of exposure scenarios.
As they run the scenarios, the students use the checkpoint\restart facility to explore the consequences of various zoning decisions, such as allowing heavy-use shopping facilities in primarily residential areas. Doing this helps them better understand what would be the best decisions.
