Virtual Environments for Ship and Shore Experiential Learning (VESSEL)

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VITAL Pedagogy Authoring Tool

The VIsual Tool for Authoring Learning in games, available here, bridges the gap between the instructional system designer and the game developer to provide a consistent method for specifying both the high level learning objectives and instructional strategy, as well as the low-level detailed logic governing how the game interacts with the students based on their actions and performance.

The authoring tool allows the user to specify high-level instructional elements, including:

• Learning objectives of a game scenario (or level)
• Conditions under which training on those objectives will be delivered
• Measures that will be used to track and evaluate performance against those objectives
• The flow of learning experiences within a scenario (i.e., sequencing within the scenario)

The authoring tool also allows the user to specify low-level instructional acts and link them to specific game events or student actions, including:

• Feedback to give to the student in response to certain actions
• Guidance to give to the student at different points in the scenario
• Negative consequences that occur in response to poor user choices
• Performance-based summary feedback to give to the student at the end of a scenario

The authoring tools provides a several user interfaces, each designed to allow an instructional element to be entered in a manner that is meaningful for that type of element. For instance, learning objectives may be entered using text, while the flow of learning experiences may be specified using a visual layout method. Underlying the authoring tool is a visual instructional logic language which captures all the high- and low-level instructional elements in a form that may be executed by our pedagogy engine.

The pedagogy engine is developed in the Java programming language and has been designed with a simple message passing framework that can be integrated with different game engines. To date, the pedagogy engine has been integrated with Delta3D, VBS2 (TM), Unity3D (TM) and Silverlight (TM) game engines.

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