Structured Language Learning Within Virtual Worlds

This project combined aspects of gamification; structured vocabulary and sentence learning tasks; and a 2D virtual world. The question of whether the virtual world offered any measurable benefit

103

to learning outcomes is difficult to answer for certain under the current project structure as the quantitative testing did not involve any control group that did not work within the virtual world. The qualitative observations showed that students enjoyed the virtual world and they were consistently observed wanting progress through the tasks to discover new levels and virtual spaces. The perception of progression and exploration through a virtual environment offers a unique way to structure learning experiences. Most importantly the virtual world allowed a perception of space that was key to teaching locative prepositions as they require learners to have a conceptual understanding of how the language refers to the relative location of objects. The teaching of adjectives is another area that is enhanced by the virtual world. In this project the key adjectives developed related to the colour of objects. Users had to make meaning from sentences describing the relative position of coloured objects and then recreate them in the virtual world; this is based on the way physical objects are used to construct understanding in The Silent Way method of language learning where learners interact with real world objects based on positions and adjectives. This was fully developed into the software but only trailed within one of the iterations due to the amount of time and content required to scaffold these more complex sentences. The virtual world provided a good way to structure activities relating to these language concepts that would be hard to do on paper or verbally. In this particular project, when the activity relating to locative prepositions and adjectives was run, learners who knew the basic vocabulary for colours and locative prepositions had to concentrate to make meaning from them in more complex sentences in order to complete the game tasks; learners were observed to carefully read the sentences which showed that the concept of requiring them to make meaning from a sentence in order to construct the corresponding actions in the virtual world could help in learning. The ability of the virtual world to automatically sense the relative location of objects with different properties provides a very practical way to automatically teach and test users understanding of these sentence structures and subsequently get them to improve their understanding of these concepts.

In terms of motivation and engagement, the virtual world was very effective. The first iteration in which very few aspects of gamification were implemented into the game world showed that the students were engaged simply by moving around the world. The virtual world is not a prerequisite for gamified learning. The addition of game mechanics like star systems, points and progressive ranks do not require a virtual world. The benefit of the virtual world over implementing game

104

mechanics into simpler text based activities is worth examining as a virtual world requires a lot of extra resources to create. As mentioned in the literature review, the expertise and resources required to create more complex games means that there are few complex games specifically created for formal education. While the benefits to engagement and motivation were observed there are several other considerations that should be made when considering the development of virtual worlds for learning. Ways to augmenting existing learning should be considered rather than simply ways to complete traditional activities within a virtual world; in the current project, the vocabulary matching is cognitively not much different to flash card based learning; the tasks involving riding objects to positions relative to other objects involved activities that would have been difficult to do without some virtual representation of the objects in space and were a step towards leveraging the affordances of modern game engines rather than simply placing what are essentially paper based activities within an app. As creating game engines from scratch is a lengthy process some of the best opportunities for creating learning experiences in virtual worlds can potentially be found in creating content for existing games or using well-resourced development kits. In this case a development kit and several plugins were used to aid development; efficient workflows for creating and implementing game assets such as animations and images also speed up the process.

While the simulated game world proved to be an effective context for structuring a purpose built gamified learning tool it is definitely an approach that requires a lot of extra time and resources. The aforementioned prevalence of studies involving virtual worlds to center around the use of pre- existing virtual worlds rather than creating worlds for the purpose of language learning indicates that there are practical reasons for the lack of purpose built virtual worlds but that there is also potential for further developments in purpose built virtual worlds.