Croquelandia

Julie Sykes, Dept of Spanish and Portuguese, U of MN
Liz Wendland, Office of Information Technology, U of MN
Peter Moore, Office of Information Technology, U of MN

Understanding the power of synthetic imeersive environments for language learning (and learning in general):

• harnessing the creative power of video games for the 'good' of education
• encouraging the development of Ss' identity in a way that incorporates the Ss' real identity with new skills and new 'identities' acquired in foreign contexts

Images of locations were scanned into 3 D.

Very interesting promo video: http://croquet.umn.edu

Difficulties in Pragmatic Instruction

Second Order Barriers

• Micro vs. Macro
• Theoretical Support
• Missing Materials & Time

First-Order Barriers

• Individual sensitivity
• emotional connections
• varation
• feedback & assessment

She came up with using virtual immersive environments to solve the problems above in teaching pragmatics, not because she was interested in using games for education.

Idea: getting design/architecture students to create virtual worlds for language students to use.

Idea: the ability to change gender and age to explore different perspectives on language and cultural use.

students used the game, but communicated with each other via IM or email, outside of the game environment.

Interaction with virtual characters.  Ss listen to conversation from avatars, and then get a choice of various responses.

They attempted do an assessment with native speakers in the environment, but it was logistically difficult.  Ss didn't want to do this during the day, gaming was what they do in their free time in evenings, etc.  Ss hated doing this in the lab, they wanted to do it at home.

Research questions:

Question 1

• varied participant roles but little experiementation (Ss didn't experiment with roles)
• use of feedback = enhanced learning experience (those who did quests multiple time improved)
• content resource vs. practice space

Questions 2

• improved knowledge about performing requests and apologies
• evidence of improvement with most salient "chunks" (e.g. Lo siento)

Other Insights

• Learneers are high-demand consumers of tech
• positive perception of the learning activity
• high learner motivation (92% of students they would do this again, saw benefit)

Croquet is peer-to-peer software, they setup a peer on a server for the class to use for this project.

Not as much lag in Croque as in Second Life.

One class hour teaching pragmatics.  One class hour on tech instruction for the software.  Online tutorial videos also available.

Croquet is really hard to use right now, learning curve is high. 

I do like that this is a more authentic environment, consciously created for the purpose of education.  Much more useful than anything in Second Life.