Even though VR technology offers seemingly limitless possibilities for the enhancement of teaching materials, it has not been widely adopted by instructors in the academy due to both its novelty and the technical skills required for its use – primarily the necessity of video game design and coding skills. This is especially beneficial for students of ancient history and archaeology who may not be able to examine archaeological materials and environments in person due to the prohibitive costs of travel, general inaccessibility of archaeological materials, and more recently due to the global pandemic. In addition, the recent proliferation of consumer-grade virtual reality (VR) hardware has made a wide range of immersive experiences, locations, and environments more accessible than ever. Based on the fact that an entire generation born into a world of user-generated digital content will soon fill the seats of classrooms at colleges and universities worldwide, it seems more appropriate than ever to explore the benefits of constructionist learning approaches using digital media technologies in higher education. With the advent of social media platforms such as Youtube, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, user-generated content has become the most commonly created and consumed form of media in many of our daily lives. In this respect, the constructionist approach encourages learners to build knowledge out of their experiences, especially when they are constructing objects or artifacts. This approach is best exemplified in Seymour Papert's concept of constructionism, which stresses the importance of ‘learning-by-making’ and, in the case of Papert's work in the fields of mathematics and computer science, using digital-media as a tool to achieve constructionist learning goals (Kafai, Reference Kafai1995 Papert, Reference Papert1980, Reference Papert1993). The second goal is to address the technical and pedagogical challenges of using game design software in the classroom and to propose ways in which this assignment can be improved in the future.įor a number of decades now there has been much scholarly discussion in the fields of cognitive behaviour and education about the benefits of pedagogical approaches that favour design over instruction – that is to say, learning experiences in which students actively design learning material instead of simply consuming material designed to transmit knowledge to them. Using this experiment as a case study, the goal of this article is twofold: firstly, to assess the pedagogical efficacy of constructionist approaches to teaching students about Roman architecture, specifically using VR and video game design technology. In doing so, students were able to create a virtual built environment based on their research, navigate it, and discuss the space with a sense of immersion and scale. For this assignment they were to conduct research on a variety of Roman public buildings in groups, build digital reconstructions of them using the Unity 3D game engine, and present them to the class in the form of a virtual reality (VR) simulation. In October of 2018, a pedagogical experiment was conducted at York University, Toronto, Canada, in which students were given an assignment.
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