Welcome to Frog Island
Frog Island is an environment where students will embark on an exploration of a 3D virtual outdoor habitat and visit various "huts" to learn about topics such as anatomy, physiology (digestion, respiration, circulation), biomechanics, and diversity, to mention a few. They will have accessible at all times,a workbook containing an outline of the various lesson plans. This will allow them to enter observations, to raise questions, or to enter answers to questions that are posed. The workbook will help students stay focused on a particular lesson plan without getting lost in the course of visiting various links. In addition to the workbook and VRML windows, there will also be a supplementary window where relevant text, images, and videos can be displayed. To facilitate unstructured learning modes, students will also be encouraged to explore the virtual environment on their own, interacting and noting any observations they may care to make. When a student has finished her lesson plans, she can produce a web document that summarizes her progress, the places she has visited, and the annotations she has made along the way. This summary will be made available to her teachers who are then free to post them to the web at the appropriate time.
The virtual habitat will resemble a natural setting with ponds, grass, trees, meadows. There will be various theme-based activity huts and regions that will provide students with various resources needed to complete their lesson plans and activities. The first hut students will be guided to is the Orientation hut. Here they will get an overview of the environment, the learning goals, and the lesson plans they will encounter. A friendly ranger or nature interpreter will provide the introductory remarks.
We identified the following huts for our initial Frog Island environment:
Students will be encouraged to visit the orientation and diversity huts before embarking on the more challenging places such as the Biomechanics hut. Whenever they choose to visit huts to engage in activities that require them to be well grounded in fundamental knowledge (e.g., anatomy and physiology), they willing be invited to explore the fundamental concepts before continuing. This will hopefully result in more powerful context-based learning activities within a goal-driven environment.
We envision that the various huts can be developed in parallel by different developers (including teachers). Our goal is to make it easy for teachers to add their own content or augment the existing content with their own resources. In addition, we plan to make it easy to instrument the students activities (implicit record keeping) as well as allowing students to record and publish their own findings (explicit record keeping).
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