Background: Owing to the exponential growth of three-dimensional (3D) environments amongst researchers and educators to create simulation games (SGs) in primary education, there is a growing interest to examine their potential support in computer science courses instead of visual programming environments. Objectives: This study explores the…

The main objective of this study is to determine whether boys and girls learn better when the characteristics of the pedagogical agent are matched to the gender of the learner while learning in immersive virtual reality (VR). Sixty-six middle school students (33 females) were randomly assigned to learn about laboratory safety with one of two…

This research investigates the role of virtual experiments and worked examples in the learning of the control of variable strategy (CVS). Sixty-nine seventh-grade students participated in this study over a span of 6 weeks and were engaged in worked example learning and/or virtual experimentation to study the knowledge and procedures associated…

Reasoning about ecosystems includes consideration of causality over temporal and spatial distances; yet learners typically focus on immediate time frames and local contexts. Teaching students to reason beyond these boundaries has met with some success based upon tests that cue students to the types of reasoning required. Virtual worlds offer an…

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…