The NDSU WorldWide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC) develops Virtual Worlds for Education. These projects span a range from Earth Science to Anthropology, and from Business to Biology, and they share strategy, assumptions, assessment, and an emerging tool set. Tools allow each project to leverage from the insights and advances of the others. As these projects expand to new content and across new disciplines, the need increases for tools for building virtual worlds.

The NDSU World Wide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC; McClean, Schwert, Juell, Saini-Eidukat, Slator, White. 1999; Slator, Juell, McClean, Saini-Eidukat, Schwert, White, Hill, 1999; Slator et al., 1999), is currently engaged in several virtual/visual development projects: three are NSF-supported, the Geology Explorer (Saini-Eidukat, Schwert, Slator, 1998, 1999; Slator et al., 1998; Slator, Schwert, Saini-Eidukat 1999; Schwert, Slator, Saini-Eidukat 1999), the Virtual Cell (McClean, 1998; White, McClean, and Slator, 1999a, 1999b) the Visual Computer Program (Juell 1999) and the ProgrammingLand MOO (Hill and Slator, 1998; Slator and Hill 1999). Shared goals include the mission to teach Science structure and process: the Scientific Method, scientific problem solving, deduction, hypothesis formation and testing, and experimental design. The individual goals are to teach the content of individual scientific disciplines: Geoscience, Cell Biology, Computer Science in the "active learning" paradign (Reid 1994).

WWWIC also has active research projects in the development of tools for building virtual educational environments. The ultimate aim in developing software tools is to support the construction of synthetic environments and move development into the hands of content specialists, teachers, and curriculum developers, rather than computer programmers.

The WWWIC program for designing and developing educational media implements a coherent strategy for all of its efforts. This strategy is to deploy teaching systems that share critical assumptions and technologies in order to leverage from each others efforts. In particular, systems are designed to employ consistent elements across disciplines and, as a consequence, foster the potential for intersecting development plans and common tools for that development. Having gained experience in the hand-crafting of these systems, WWWIC is now in the process of designing and developing an integrated library of software tools to substantially streamline the development of future worlds.

The server side platform for all these projects is LambdaMOO (Curtis 1992), an advanced multi-user-extensible domain. For educational simulations and games, this requires that the content of the environment is based on a scientific domain. Currently game construction requires a certain level of programming skills and programming background; but most of our eventual users will be non-computer majors and may not have any programming background at all. This promises to seriously slow down the development of educational games. To overcome this difficulty, we attempt to develop a series of tools to help people to construct and manipulate the objects in a scientific knowledge base, hosted in a virtual world, through Internet-based tools employing a graphical user interface.

All tools are being combined into the Integrated Virtual World Building Tool, described below. WWWIC tools primarily support simulation and agent building, and are of the following types

Jia (1998) implements a first version of a graphical tool for building abstraction hierarchies in LambdaMOO. This tool enables the creation, deletion, renaming, and recategorizing of objects. Tools of this sort enable content experts to visualize the structure of the knowledgebase and assist with creating the taxonomic structures for representing conceptual knowledge.

The Environmental Effects Tool is for associating background graphics and environmental effects with "rooms" in Virtual Worlds. This tool provides a form-filling interface for specifying what graphical elements should be visible when a player, say, walks into an area of a planet representing an Exfoliation Dome or a Cirque (Slator et al., 1998).

The Dollar Bay retailing game is an interactive multi-media, mutli-player, educational, and simulation-based economic game. The goal of Dollar Bay is to teach a wide set of skills associated with running a retail business by allowing the students to run a simulated store in a simulated economic environment. Players are expected to do many of the things real retailers do. They can order products from distributors, they can shop around for better prices, they can buy advertising, they can do market research, and they have power to hire or fire employees, and so on (Slator and Chaput, 1996; Hooker and Slator, 1996).

Dollar Bay uses product classes and models as its representation. The Artifact Builder Tool is used to build artifacts by users without programming background. The tool is supposed to be useful and compatible with any of our virtual worlds, but at this stage, we emphasize artifacts needed in Dollar Bay.

This module emphasizes building new products based on similarity with pre-defined prototypes: the user constructs their own products by choosing different values provided by the system, or by using their own data to add new properties to the product, allowing system values based on previously defined products. There is a window containing multiple choices for each property of the product within a similar product category, and users can compose the product by pressing different buttons. For example, a Bandsaw is defined as an instance of Power Tool, and inherits properties from its parent. When a player wants to build a new Table Saw object, the Economic Artifacts Tool provides intelligent suggestions on what possible features the new Table Saw might have based on similarity with the previous definition of Bandsaw. The user can take the suggestions from the system and compose new Power Tools by choosing from feature lists.

The Economic Artifacts Tool also lets the user build products by using customized data. If the user is not satisfied with information and data provided by system, they can build their own product by using their own data. They can use some default values provided by system to build some aspects of the product, and they can add new properties to the product and provide their own data.

Most importantly, each product constructed by the user, must incorporate the interconnection among products and other elements of the virtual world. These are defined when products are defined. Before users construct a particular product, they define parameters about related groups, such as which simulated consumer group is interested in this product, the size of the group, the maximum demand on this type of product, and so forth.

The WWWIC virtual educational environments share the need for conversation networks for agents within the environment. The conversation network of an agent is important because it gives depth to the character of the agent. However building multilevel conversation networks directly in LambdaMOO, which is the programming language used to create virtual environments, is tedious and error prone. In addition, the direct coding approach does not allow the user, who is building the virtual world, to visualize the conversation network and test the traversal of the conversation network.

Figure 1: the Zelecon Constructor

To solve this problem a tool has been built called ZeleCon, which provides for the construction of multilevel conversation networks for the agents in educational simulation environment. The tool is built in Java and integrates three independent programs under centralized control. The independent programs are: the Visualization Program for visualizing the topology of the conversation network, the Response Constructor for creating nodes within the conversation network, and the Testing Program for testing the traversal of conversation network. There is also a fourth program called the Telnet Window, which allows for direct connection to the educational simulation and can be used by an advanced user to submit commands to the server or for a log of the session.

The spatial environment tool (i.e. a virtual map building tool) allows environment designers to graphically create and manipulate spaces in a virtual world. By using a map-like interface, content specialists decide on the specification of locations, such as geological formations and placement of these in relation to each other.

Virtual worlds allow its users to become immersed in a computer generated environment. Virtual environments help users to understand and use information to solve problems. This is important because the goal is not just to teach and have learners master the content, but to excite the learner’s interest and immerse them in a problem-solving context.

The Virtual Map Builder tool facilitates creating new spaces (called rooms), and representing these in the form of a map. The rooms are created with a spatial orientation in the eight possible directions (n, s, e, w, ne, nw, se, sw). The tool gives a virtual look at the objects created by the user, which provides visualizations that are difficult otherwise.

The Virtual Map Builder Tool lets the user create new rooms on the map. The user perceives the complete picture of all the rooms. The user is also provided with the tool to create new rooms on the map interface. This is achieved with a function to create new rooms. The user first decides the position of the new room on the map, and by clicking on a button causes a small rectangular shaped room to appear on the map interface.

At this point, the rooms on the map are too small to see in full perspective, so with a mouse over event on the small room, the tool displays the picture of the room to the side of the map. The place to display the picture of the map is predefined on the GUI. This event indicates the presence of a room in a virtual miniworld.

All the rooms in the miniworld have some content. The contents are not displayed on the map. The Mouse down event when triggered gives the user an overall description of the contents in the room. The place where this content is displayed is also predefined. It appears below the picture of the room.

The user is allowed to create new exits to the room on the map. The creation of the new exits is achieved by the click of a button. The exit can be created from the room that the user owns to the room that he/she intends to visit. First the user needs to click on the room and then click on the room they intend to visit. These two rooms will be the start and the destination for which the exit is be created. Finally clicking on a button will create an access to the desired room.

The user is able to move the rooms on the map to the location of their choice. This facilitates creating exits between two or more rooms, and also checks the contents within each room. The user is not allowed to move rooms that are not in their possession. The user can move their rooms by dragging and dropping.

The database consists of all the representations of the objects in the miniworld, along with their object number. Whenever a player creates a new room, the database is updated. All the rooms that are seen on the map are from the database.

Figure 2: the Map Builder

We are implementing a master tool that coordinates and manages the process of building virtual worlds. This tool supports the implementation of virtual worlds from the ground up, by giving access to the construction tools, and a "surface" view of the world as it develops. For example, content specialists building, say, a virtual space for paleontology, will use the Virtual Abstraction Tool to create the hierarchy of concepts related to fossils. Then the Virtual Entity Tool (described below) will be used to create an inventory of fossils in different categories. Meanwhile, the Spatial Environment Tool will be used to create canyons and mountains where the fossils will reside. The integrated tool set, which we are calling the World Builder, will support the developer's exploration of the virtual world as they develop it. At the same time, the integrated tool will support the Deductive Tutoring Agent Tool (described below), since they operate on the same objects.

Figure 3: the World Builder

The World Builder has a graphical user interface for ease of use and is an entry point to individual tools. The tools are used by content managers (such as course instructors) to edit games or create new objects. For security, a content manager has to logon on to each individual tool in order to edit the content. The World Builder user interface is designed for simplicity and ease of use

The Virtual Entity Tool will employ an entity template system with a form-filling interface to enable creation of multiple instances of a category. For example, the user will define a template for minerals that specifies the properties indigenous to minerals, and ranges of values associated with each property. Then, a content specialist will create new minerals, quartz, tourmaline, talc, etc., with a graphical form-filling interface where values such as color, texture, and hardness can be quickly and easily selected from menus. This tool is general in that any category of entity (animal, mineral, or vegetable) can be constructed with it.

The Deductive Tutoring Agent Tool is to

1. provide a menu of virtual testing equipment and the range of values each produces -- from this a subject matter expert can choose the appropriate instrument-value pairs;

2. provide a menu of substances in the same category, to serve as a template; and

3. check other substances to insure a unique set of plausibly sufficient criteria for each.

These three functions will insure that tutoring is supported on all identification tasks and will have the further benefit of checking for consistency of artifacts in the synthetic world (Slator, and Farooque, 1998).

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