Education for use in Middle to High school age bracket has become increasing difficult for teachers to teach and with schools become increasingly overfilled and students becoming less interested in their studies as they grow older, keeping their interest sparked can become increasingly difficult. History is a favorite subject of mine and has become increasingly overlooked at times as students try to cram years of information about their states, countries, and world history over the course of a couple years. I propose that by interacting with them through an outlet which most students use commonly today, the computer, you can establish 3D environments where a student can explore while gaining intense amounts of knowledge that may ordinarily be forgotten or hard to teach within a normal day’s lesson plan.
“The field of instructional technology has witness tremendous growth in research and development of interactive multimedia learning environments in recent years, especially computer based environments.” (Rieber)
Learning is an important part of the development process for any adolescent. It shapes our morals, goals, thought processes, and overall understanding of the world around us. In recent years that has been a steady increase in the number of middle school and high school dropouts (Snyder). Studies have proven that the old methods of “chalk and talk” are not a valid as they once might have been and recent studies have proven that the majority of high school students are kinesthetic learners (Snyder), compared to the traditional learning style which mostly accommodates the auditory listeners. Kinesthetic learners are students who learn mostly by doing directly or by having some form of hands on control of what they are directly learning. In terms of learning history, a extremely hard thing to illustrate visually, this lends itself to the direct use of 3D generated historical environments in which students can explore and with simple tasks, be able to learn lessons by exerting their own methods of learning the material.
Historical Reenactments have been used to illustrate and show history visually acted out in front of a viewer. These reenactments have been generally used throughout time to reconstruct historical sequences for educational purposes. One of the for reenactments being the Passion Play, the depiction of the Crucifixion of Jesus, which started Oberammergau, Germany as a way to stop the Bubonic plague from continuing to destroy their town (Sticca). It now is continued every ten years as tradition to portray the historic event to all of the attendants. Historical reenactments are most common around areas of the United States where the original 13 colonies were established and where major civil war battles took place. Many of the reenactments are funded by the state or city to give educational background to the cities heritage and history. From these Historical Reenactments, educational values can be directly interpreted into a computer generated 3D environment thereby enhancing perspective on historical events and processes while learning through direct visual experience.
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