The computer game sensation "Minecraft" has become a mainstay amongst school students of all ages. Anecdotally, at Geoscience Australia, we have observed that "Minecrafters" often draw comparisons between their Minecraft experiences and the real world. For some students, the line between reality and fantasy is blurred. At the…

Over the last 3 years, the "Climate Change and Me" project has mapped children and young people's affective, creative, and ontological relationships with climate change through an emergent and child-framed research methodology. The project has involved working with 135 children and young people from across Northern NSW, Australia, as…

The purpose of this study was to explore one novice clinical educator's experiences with training essential communication and interpersonal skills using a virtual patient. Over 3 weeks, the clinical educator (CE) delivered a series of half-day clinical placements to students using an educator-controlled virtual patient, depicting an older adult…

The use of multiuser virtual environments for educational purposes is in its infancy but offers potential for exploration of spatial contexts that could not otherwise be experienced. We report on pre-service teachers' experiences in designing learning activities as a result of immersion in the CAVE2™, a 320-degree, cylindrical 3D virtual…

In this paper, we investigate an application of virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI) as a technological combination that has a potential to improve the learning experience and engage with the modern generation of students. To address this need, we have created a virtual reality replica of one of humanity's first cities, the city of…

Use of technology in the mathematics classroom has the potential to advance children's learning of mathematics and enhance their attitudes about mathematics. When used in conjunction with purposeful planning, teachers can use technological tools to reinforce their pedagogical intentions and to facilitate relevant learning activities for students.…

Augmented Reality is poised to profoundly transform Education as we know it. The capacity to overlay rich media onto the real world for viewing through web-enabled devices such as phones and tablet devices means that information can be made available to students at the exact time and place of need. This has the potential to reduce cognitive…

In Australian law schools didactic pedagogies such as lectures devoted to the transmission of theory and knowledge to a largely passive audience still predominate. However, curriculum design embedding authentic learning pedagogies has been shown to be supportive of student learning. The challenge in adopting such curriculum design is how to offer…

Three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds have been used for more than a decade in higher education for teaching and learning. Since the 1980s, academics began using virtual worlds as an exciting and innovative new technology to provide their students with new learning experiences that were difficult to provide any other way. But since that time,…

Humans have an evolved embodied cognition that equips them to deal easily with the natural movements of object manipulations. Hence, learning a manipulative task is generally more effective when watching animations that show natural motions of the task, rather than equivalent static pictures. The present study was completed to explore this…

Background: Integrating 3D virtual world technologies into educational subjects continues to draw the attention of educators and researchers alike. The focus of this study is the use of a virtual world, Second Life, in higher education teaching. In particular, it explores the potential of using a virtual world experience as a learning component…

A traditional approach centred on weekly lectures, perhaps supported by tutorials, still predominates in modern legal education in Australia. This approach tends to focus on the transmission of knowledge about legal rules and doctrine to students, who adopt a largely passive role. Criticisms of the traditional approach have led to law schools…

"World of Warcraft" is an online computer game with over nine million players, many of them technically-minded young males. A proportion of these young males engage in spontaneous creative writing about their game adventures. They enjoy highly formulaic genres, such as the epic poem, with its complex technical requirements. This has…

This work presents a unique education resource for both process engineering students and the industry workforce. The learning environment is based around spherical imagery of real operating plants coupled with interactive embedded activities and content. This Virtual Reality (VR) learning tool has been developed by applying aspects of relevant…

Australian higher education increasingly relies on flexible modes of delivery as a means of attracting and retaining students in a highly competitive global education market. While education is among those disciplines that have been most actively involved in the shift from face-to-face to online learning and teaching, the transition for many…