BEV Seminar: Adult-Child Differences in Spatial Learning in an Immersive Virtual Environment

Blacksburg Electronic Village Seminar: Faith McCreary, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Tuesday October 21, 1997, from 4-5 pm, Squires Student Center, Room 140 (next to the Information Desk), Virginia Tech campus.

Abstract

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) have the potential to change the way students learn. They offer students the opportunity to interact with a computer-generated simulation of a real or imaginary environment in an intuitive manner. Despite the potential of immersive VEs as educational tools, little is known about how VE system parameters impact a child using the environment. Designers of VE applications targeted at children must rely on studies done with adults to guide their design decisions. The failure to understand how children differ from adults in their responses to VEs poses a serious obstacle to the design of effective learning environments for children. The seminar will summarize the results of this research and discuss its implications for VE designers.