The LAVA Case Study

The LAVA case study aims to provide students with a realistic substitute for real-world excavation experience. As such LAVA essentially allows students to collaborate in planning, undertaking and exploring the findings of a series of archaeological fieldwork activities. The overall objective is to enable students to construct an improved understanding of the subject area by engaging in higher order learning behaviours as described in Chapter 2. LAVA achieves this objective by focussing on five main tenets: learner engagement, personalisation, groupwork and collaborative working, realism and accessibility.

4.2.1 Learner Engagement

It is important for the system to be engaging so that it helps motivate students to explore the subject matter, developing their technical skills and deepening their understanding of practical archaeological processes. In achieving this, methodologies employed in the development of computer games are borrowed. Angband [151, 152] was found to be a useful model. It is a text based game that allows characters to develop their skills, acquire artefacts, explore the environment, and progress through various challenges before achieving the core goal of defeating Morgorth and saving Middle Earth. Within Angband, characters have varying skill levels. Players have to explore and interact with the environment. Progress through a succession of levels is dependent on the player’s actions. When considering LAVA, the goal of defeating Morgorth is replaced with uncovering and analysing material culture and ancient architectural features of the excavation site. Technically this approach does not fit well with Web-based architectures as the progress made and state of the environment both need to be maintained on an ongoing basis. Hence a Web 2.0 based service architecture is adopted which allows state to be maintained over multiple sessions, with different presentation interfaces being used to provide learners with 2D and 3D access to the underlying excavation state.

4.2.2 Personalisation

Personalisation is important as it emphasises the role of the learner as the central point of the learning process. Within the education sector the benefits of personalisation have been widely understood, as discussed in section 2.4.2, with the benefits of Portal type technologies frequently employed by educational institutions in their efforts to develop systems to manage the overall learning process [97]. By extending the reach of existing personalisation techniques into the realm of 3D environments, LAVA makes it possible to introduce personalisation into MUVEs. Within LAVA this approach has been used to enable the synchronisation of the 2D and 3D excavation sites presented to learners, with the progress and number of finds uncovered in the 2D environment being mirrored in the 3D recreations of the excavation site.

4.2.3 Groupwork and Collaborative Working

The motivation behind enabling support for collaborative learning is two fold. On the one hand, real archaeological excavations involve a high level of collaboration. On the other hand, groupwork is an

important transferable skill which is often underdeveloped within traditional educational contexts. In LAVA, learners are organised into groups that have to agree upon key decisions that are made. Each group has a different perception of the environment with each member of a group sharing a common view. Therefore, if a user performs an action which changes the state of the environment, the change is filtered through to all other members of the same group.

The implication of this requirement is that support for groupwork should be at the heart of a service based architecture. This is met by an architecture built around the abstractions of users, groups and resources (as shown in the database organisation depicted in Figure 26). Users are allocated to a group. Each resource that is allocated to that group is automatically made accessible to all the users within the group. Groupwork is supported through the provision of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. It is noteworthy that the use of 3D environments based on first person shooter game and MUVE technologies naturally lend themselves to co-operative endeavours.

4.2.4 Realism

It is important that learning activities, as far as possible, are situated within realistic scenarios as this helps motivate those engaged in the learning process and helps ensure that both the practical and more abstract learning outcomes are realised. There are several approaches employed to develop realism. Firstly LAVA is based upon a real archaeological site [8, 153] with a well researched background that has been extensively excavated by several academics [16, 154]. A wide range of archaeological resources from this site have been digitised and are made available to the learner. These resources are organised geographically through maps so that learners can select geographic locations in which to find relevant artefacts. In addition the digital resources are organised temporally so that learners engage in sequenced activities, the successful conclusion of which yields archaeological finds that are appropriate to the activity being undertaken. These sequences are discussed in more detail in section 4.7.2.

The second way in which realism is achieved is by employing a range of different technologies at different stages of the simulation: text is used to provide contextual information, 2D maps are used to define location, photographs are used to provide high fidelity images, and 3D environments based on

game and MUVE technologies are used to provide a sense of spatial awareness and to facilitate exploration.

To achieve this, the technical challenges of adapting 3D technologies to facilitate appropriate interactions had to be met, with the results integrated into a service-based learning environment. The architecture used to achieve this integration is discussed further in section 4.9.2.

4.2.5 Accessibility

Accessibility is important so that LAVA is able to be accessed within lecture theatres, IT labs and classrooms and from a student’s home computer. This allows learners to exercise control over their engagement in the learning process so that they can proceed at a pace which is appropriate for them. Using a service-based architecture helps to meet this aim, as does the use of gaming and 3D technologies that may be deployed across the Internet without the need for specialised computer hardware or networks or extensive prior configuration of client machines.