Associate Degree Nursing (ADN) faculty are challenged by the monumental responsibility of preparing students to function as safe, professional nurses in a two year course of study. Advances in computer technology and emphasis on integrating technology and active learning strategies into existing course structures have prompted many nurse educators…

In this paper we examine the transferability of the Jigsaw and Fishbowl collaborative learning techniques to the Second Life platform. Our aim is to assess the applicability of Second Life for collaborative learning by developing virtual tools and metaphors and exploiting the representational richness of this novel medium. In order to enhance the…

Corporate training professionals led the explosion of e-learning solutions in the 1990s. Yet in 2008, as new generations of technology-savvy, computer games-oriented employees are entering the workforce, corporate training departments are far behind universities in exploring the use of virtual worlds like Second Life or Protosphere as platforms…

This study associates the perceived effectiveness of alternative teaching methods with perceived instructional emphasis areas for each of two groups: faculty and students. It seeks to determine the congruency between faculty and student response. The results evidence a commonality between faculty and student perceptions as to the effectiveness of…

While there has been extensive experimental research on haptics, less has been conducted on cross-modal interactions between visual and haptic perception and even less still on cross-modal applications in instructional settings. This study looks at a simulation on the principles of levers using both visual and haptic feedback: one group received…

We present an immersive virtual reality (VR) application for physics education. It utilizes a recent physics engine developed for the PC gaming market to simulate physical experiments correctly and accurately. Students are enabled to actively build their own experiments and study them. A variety of tools are provided to analyze forces, mass, paths…

Educational computer games provide an environment in which interactions among students, teachers, and texts differ non-trivially from those of the traditional classroom. In order to build and research computer games effectively, it is important to provide a theoretical background that adequately describes and explains learning and interactions in…

Nowhere in the current digital technology landscape is the process of "blurring the lines between media" more apparent than with the uses and applications of gaming practices and technologies. Here the overlaps between new media and media interfaces are becoming significant as games technologies and practices are becoming more pervasive as…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 16th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2019), held during November 7-9, 2019, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) and co-organised by University Degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy.…

Educators know that people learn best by doing. When students are doing something rather than reading or learning about it, they learn better. Immersive environments help students retain more information and speed up their learning. There's an enhancement in the way they learn. Immersive environments--which utilize technologies like simulations,…

Based on a categorization of simulation and gaming barriers developed in a previous study, this work seeks to explore in greater depth the composition and nature of these obstacles. It examines the interrelationships between the barriers and the impact of other contextual factors in the pedagogic environment. A series of in-depth interviews were…

The purpose of this article is to present the results of a study conducted to investigate how the attributes of 3-D technology such as avatars, 3-D space, and comic style bubble dialogue boxes affect participants' social, cognitive, and teaching presences in a blended problem-based learning environment. The community of inquiry model was adopted…

This paper presents the results of a study on the use of a virtual reality (VR) world in a German language classroom. After participating in a lesson on the use of commands, students experienced the language and culture through navigation in a VR world. It is argued that this new medium allows for students to be immersed in the target culture and…

A novel instructional computer simulation that incorporates a dynamic analogy to represent Le Chatelier's Principle was designed to investigate the contribution of this feature to students' understanding. Two groups of 12th grade Chemistry students (n=15) interacted with the computer simulation during the study. Both groups did the same…

We examined whether using virtual reality (VR) technology to provide students with direct exposure to evidence-based psychological treatment approaches would enhance their understanding of and appreciation for such treatments. Students enrolled in an abnormal psychology course participated in a VR session designed to help clients overcome the fear…