HOBOKEN, N.J. — The National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education has awarded $500,000 to two professors of Mechanical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, to pursue the research goals laid out in their successful proposal, "Virtual Environments for Collaborative Learning."
The lead investigators, Dr. Sven Esche and Dr. Constantin Chassapis, will be joined by researchers from Columbia University's Teacher's College in developing and assessing the impacts of virtual learning environments in the undergraduate engineering experience.
"This research has two primary objectives," said Esche, an Associate Professor in Stevens' Department of Mechanical Engineering. "The first goal is to facilitate distance learning by enabling advanced virtual laboratories for deployment in online degree programs and usage by co-op students.
"The second goal is to provide immersive virtual environments for collaborative learning and team-building in undergraduate engineering education," he continued, "while at the same time affording flexibility to on-campus students to run experiments outside regular class time, thus allowing for a blended laboratory delivery mode, whereby students spend a limited time in a laboratory facility to familiarize themselves with the equipment, materials and procedures, and then access an online laboratory to conduct additional experimental procedures."
"This project will explore the potential for using multiplayer game engines for developing virtual laboratory environments for collaborative learning in undergraduate engineering education," said Chassapis, Professor and Director of Stevens' Department of Mechanical Engineering. "Such environments are expected to provide students with an opportunity for exercising their problem-solving skills in the context of advanced cyberinfrastructure-enabled tools, whereby they interact collaboratively with each other and with highly interactive virtual laboratory exercises."
During the pursuit of this research, an immersive virtual environment for collaborative learning will be developed, implemented and prototyped in several undergraduate mechanical engineering classes. This system will be developed using the commercially available "Source" game engine in conjunction with the associated "Source Software Development Kit" and the "3ds Max" modeling package. An assessment of the learning effectiveness of the proposed environment will be carried out, including both student feedback as well as measures of learning outcomes.
Some expected direct benefits of the proposed immersive environment for collaborative learning are that it will provide engaging laboratories for a generation of students accustomed to video games and the use of IT, enable nearly unlimited student access to the collaborative virtual laboratory experiments, address different preferred learning modalities of the students and reduce university resources required for operating certain educational laboratories.
In addition, according to Esche and Chassapis, this project will lead to the creation of more engaging curriculum content that emphasizes real-world problems, and the context in which science, engineering science and humanities knowledge can be understood and in which engineering is practiced. "This will likely be more appealing to members of underrepresented student groups," said Esche. "Furthermore, this project will directly involve significant percentages of ethnic minority and female students and expand the portfolio of innovative educational tools at Stevens Institute of Technology with potential for a future rollout to other institutions."
About Stevens Institute of Technology
Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value. Stevens offers baccalaureates, master's and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,040 undergraduate and 3,085 graduate students, and a worldwide online enrollment of 2,250, with about 250 full-time faculty. Stevens' graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.
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