Seed
Experience Climate Change And Practice Sustainable Lifestyle In A Virtual World
OVERVIEW
How to deliver a fun and powerful learning experience that promotes behavior change? This is the problem we were trying to solve in this project. Nowadays, most people have a basic understanding of climate change. However, not all of them are able to conduct environmental protection in daily life.
Through the Seed Project, we hope to awake an initial awareness of environmental protection of people. We choose Virtual Reality as the tool because it not only improve learning motivation but also facilitates behavior change.
Role
research, prototype
Team
Xueyi Xu, Jiayin Zhang, Nine Song, Tong Wang
Duration
2 months
Project Type
Instructional Design
The Learner and Learning Goal
Who is the learner?
Our learners are museum visitors with an average knowledge level of 9th grade. They have a general idea of what climate change is but lack real-life experience of the climate change effect. Also, they are not initially acting upon climate change in their daily lives.
Where does the learning happen?
The learning context of this VR simulation is the science museum. The opportunity is that this new technology could leverage the existing resources the museum already had in collections to attract more users and enhance the influence. A good example would be the American Museum of Natural History which has exhibits on climate change (American Museum of Natural History, n.d.). In addition, Virtual Reality provides an immersive space where it is hard for users to be distracted by unrelated things that induce extraneous cognitive load.
What is the learning goal?
Learners should be able to apply sustainable lifestyles in a daily life context and be aware of how their choice will affect the climate for future human beings.
What are the learning objectives?
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Learners should be able to explain the greenhouse effect mechanism.
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Learners should be able to define climate change as human-induced.
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Learners should be able to understand the effects of climate change.
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Learners should be able to identify what human activities can cause climate change.
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Learners should be able to come up with the solutions for climate change that people can do on a daily basis.
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Learners should be able to apply sustainable actions in daily life.
Design Approach
Logic Model
Design Rationale
Our design relies on feedback theory. Based on the learner’s choices in each scenario, the VR simulation will give out formative feedback which includes a) different message feedback of how he or she performed and why the performance is considered good or poor b) Virtual Reality videos that explain why certain human activities cause climate change. After the user completes the task, tailored summative feedback will be distributed. This feedback includes a summary of the learner’s behavior and suggestions about how to have a sustainable lifestyle based on the learner’s current living habits. Constructivism is also emphasized in our design. We assume our users already have some prior knowledge of climate change, and this simulation is designed to recall prior knowledge and construct new knowledge in an immersive and powerful way. The educational materials, i.e. 3-D videos, varies based on users’ prior knowledge. The prior knowledge of users’ is reflected in their choices in the virtual world.
Technology Affordance
According to the Interactive Information Processing Model, promoting the interactive engagement between people and the media is beneficial for promoting elaborative cognition processing ( Tremayne & Dunwoody, 2001). The application of using Virtual Reality as an education medium has been explored intensively. Virtual Reality not only facilitates situated learning but also improves learning motivation (Huang& Sheng, 2011). According to Markowitz, Laha, Perone, Pea, and Bailenson (2018), studies have proved that immersive Virtual Reality has a positive impact on the learning of climate change. By conducting pre- and post-test assessments, the studies suggest an improvement in participants’ ability to learn, recall, and retain the causes and effects of ocean acidification after experiencing an immersive underwater world designed to show the process and effects of rising seawater acidity. The evidence of behavior and attitude change has also been found. As the application of embodied cognition theory, our design highlights the Sense of Embodiment (SoE) by allowing users to play a self-controlled avatar in the simulation (Fribourg., Argelaguet, Lecuyer, & Hoyet, 2020).
Activity Flow
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Prototype
This VR simulation contains three parts, a virtual shopping task, adaptive education videos, and a behavior report. Upon entering the immersive virtual world, users will receive training about how to use the VR controller. After the training, they will be placed in their virtual home. Here, they will take a few minutes to get familiar with the place and try what are the actions they can perform in this virtual world. We imagine this virtual world to be very familiar with the real world, which means it should be intuitive for the user to perform different actions like open the door, cook, watch a TV, etc.
After the warm-up, users will start their virtual adventure of climate change. First, they will be presented with an introductory 3-D video that talks about the crisis our planet is experiencing due to climate change. Users will witness the famine in Africa because of droughts, the dying of polar bears because of glacial melting, deconstruction of homeland because of flooding, and so on. This video is meant to emphasize the emergency of stopping climate change and raise emotional resonance. After the video, users will begin the grocery shopping task in which they are going to the virtual grocery to buy food for themselves for the next three days. This task is meant to measure whether people are aware or can apply sustainable behavior in their daily life. There are 4 measurable actions each tied to one source that contributes to climate change, plastic, transportation, waste of food, and not recycling. Users’ choice in these four scenarios reflects their prior knowledge. Based on the choice, the Virtual Reality system will prompt different text and 3-D video messages. The text message will tell users whether they made a good choice regarding the health of our planet. The video will explain why their choice will lead to beneficial or harmful consequences. Furthermore, the video content will be slightly different based on the choices. If the user performs a sustainable behavior in the task, the video content will emphasize more on what are some other actions they can take to save the world. For example, besides replacing plastic bags using straws, stop buying bottled water, bring your own cup to Starbucks, to decrease the consumption of plastic (Stephanie, 2020). For people who make a non-sustainable choice in the task, the video will focus more on explaining the damageability of plastic. After the user completes the task, a report which summarizes their behavior will be given to them. This report will also contain a piece of final customized information regarding sustainable actions. Finally, another video that projects the future of the Earth and humans will be shown. Like the introductory video, this video is also designed to raise emotional feelings and emphasize the message we are trying to deliver one last time.
Assessment and Evaluation
*Both the assessment plan and the evaluation plan will only be tested with a group of research participants we recruit. We will revise the design of the VR simulation based on the assessment and evaluation, and then place the VR simulation in the museum.
Discussion and Reflection
Challenges in implementing the design
The usability of the virtual reality headset itself may discourage many museum visitors from wearing them. First, there is a possibility that users may feel uncomfortable wearing the VR headsets in the museum so that they will give up trying to wear them. For instance, users who make up probably do not want to try it because wearing the headset will mess up their makeup or hairstyles in the museum; users who wear glasses will have difficulties wearing VR headsets because they fear the headset may scratch their glasses or their glasses won’t fit in the VR headset.
Second, we initially assume that we can apply VR, a powerful advanced technology, to improve the learning motivation. However, this assumption might be questionable while implementing VR in the real world. Some of the users might, on the contrary, be discouraged by the technology and the learning experience will be affected, as Virginia Heffernan described: “VR has always sounded fantastic in theory but felt in practice like brain poison (Heffernan, 2014)”.
Third, the content we designed may face challenges in terms of the oversimplified scenarios, the characters, and the choices. For example, the grocery shopping choices could be hard for a first-grader, while it could seem to be too simple for an adult. The character we designed could also make people feel connected(willing to use) on different levels. Those factors could affect the learning experiences.
Future Improvement
1. Provide sufficient support for users to scaffold them in overcoming the fear of VR at the first stage. Keep the instructions easy to understand and available during the whole learning journey.
2. Develop more scenarios, characters, real-life like choices (more complexed), and languages for different audiences. Special attention will be paid upon developing appropriate scenarios for children and group visitors, to better suit the museum learning environment.
3. Develop web-based VR experience for users to access even during the museum lockdown period. It is also a way to increase accessibility in terms of physical locations.
Future Research
For future research, we want to investigate more on the long-term learning effects of Virtual Reality. How effective Virtual Reality is in promoting retention rates and behavior change? It is also important to compare VR with other media such as Augmented Video, mobile application, to assess its effectiveness in teaching climate change knowledge. Research from Moreno and Mayer (2002) suggests that desktop VR can contribute to a similar level of learning as the head-mounted display. Our design is based on the assumption that learning happens in a “normal” museum environment. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, museums are not physically accessible anymore for our users. It is crucial for us to think about alternative solutions if the museum itself could not provide the learning environment physically.