VOSR 3D

Objectives and Overview

Teaching poetry has many desirable learning goals: motivation to learn, reading comprehension, the ability to relate and identify with characters, and understand the relationships between characters. Unfortunately, students may not realize these goals with current teaching methodologies.

The Voices of Spoon River is a text-based computer game developed to address desired goals for teaching poetry from the text Spoon River Anthology. This project, Voices of Spoon River 3D (download) will be taking the Voices of Spoon River game one step further by implementing it in a graphical, multi-user virtual environment where players can work together to solve puzzles to promote learning.

The purpose of VOSR 3D is to engender motivation and interest via the exploration of a graphical, 3D virtual world. Collaboration will also play an important role as the virtual world will allow for multiple learners to explore at the same time in the same environment. Learners can communicate with each other via a "chat" style of interaction. VOSR 3D will build on and keep the same desired outcomes from the text-based version of VOSR, including:

- Increased motivation to learn and study poetry

- Increased reading comprehension

- Better ability to relate and identify with characters

- Clearer understanding of the relationships between characters

- Better ability to collaborate with others in the solving of puzzles

- The ability to analyze spatial relationships in the virtual world

VOSR 3D Attributes

VOSR 3D was developed via the open source code of the Quake III engine, along with numerous other modifications and additions. By developing the game in this format, we give players the opportunity to participate in a mutliplayer environment with communication between players, allowing for collaboration and competition within the environment. The open nature of this platform makes it OS independent and available to developers across the world at no charge. VOSR 3D is a highly visual environment more aligned with popular computer games of the 21st century, and brings with it the advantages and limitations of learning in virtual 3D environments.

Research with VOSR 3D

We studied the learning experience with VOSR 3D and compared it to the learning experience with the text-based version of the game. One area of research interest is that of "perspective." How does a player's viewing perspective affect his or her learning? Our findings provide us information to improve the design and development of similar game and simulation environments.

Teacher Resources

• VOSR Lesson Plan
• VOSR Assessments
• Epitaphs
• Game Environment Map for Text Version
• Download Game
• About Game text file

Design and Development Team

• Brett Shelton (faculty advisor)
• Tim Stowell (VOSR 3D developer)
• Jon Scoresby (research assistant)

• Computers in the CLE lab
• Inform interpreter and compiler
• Quake III engine

Status

Available for download.

VOSR 3D Open Source Code
If you are interested in continuing development of this game please contact Dr. Shelton at brett.shelton@usu.edu