|
|
Faculty Profile: Amy Bruckman Educational software designer believes in learning it by doing it. By Jane M. Sanders |
How many times have you heard your children — or someone's children — ask why they had to learn a certain fact or process in school? They saw no application of that knowledge to the real world.
Amy Bruckman has heard that question, too. And she has a way to put an end to it. It's a fancy-sounding concept called "constructionism," but the premise is really quite simple.
|
"Part of the theory is that kids learn better when they know why they're doing what they're doing," explains Bruckman, an educational software designer and assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Computing. "If you tell them, 'Here, learn this equation,' they're going to moan. So you tell them let's make a robot car that explores the room itself and then hides in the shadows. And the kid says, 'But I don't understand how to make it navigate.' Then you teach that same equation in the context of getting the robot to work. Now the kid wants to know that information, and they learn it in a very different way."
Constructionism, which is widely employed in technology and communication education, deals with motivation for learning at the individual level. Bruckman takes the concept further with the power of the Internet.
"My work adds a new emphasis on the social aspects of learning," Bruckman says. "Maybe part of the reason you're making the robot car in the first place is to show off to your friends. People don't construct things in isolation. And the strength of the Internet is in giving a supportive, community context for learning and construction."
Bruckman's research career — young though it is — already is filled with numerous projects built on her confident commitment to collaborative learning via virtual communities she creates on the Internet.
A World of Words
In 1995, Bruckman and the MIT Media Lab officially launched MOOSE Crossing, a text-based virtual community for children ages 8 to 12. There, they join with a parent's written permission, download Bruckman's MacMOOSE or WinMOOSE client program to connect to the MOOSE Crossing server via an Internet connection. In the virtual community, children construct games and get to know other kids from around the world. Meanwhile, they learn reading, writing and computer programming. Children help each other and have fun creating imaginative characters and scenarios.
"You could build a swamp next to the forest, a pet store in town, or maybe a disco in The Emerald City," Bruckman says. "You could make an elephant that tells elephant jokes, or a robot that asks people what they think about nuclear power. The world of MOOSE Crossing is built of words by kids, for kids. Big people are welcome too — especially teachers looking for interesting activities for their classes."
MOOSE Crossing, now based at Georgia Tech at www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/moose-crossing, has been a success with pre-teens and teens. About 300 children are active participants now, and several teachers use MOOSE Crossing in their classrooms. Many children have improved their writing skills, teachers report, and made a lot of new friends.
Now, A Graphical World
As an assistant professor in the College of Computing, Bruckman supervises and collaborates with doctoral degree students in their research projects. True to her "constructionist" philosophy, Bruckman thoroughly enjoys the interaction, she says. (300-dpi JPEG version - 492k)
"AquaMOOSE makes different learning ideas salient," Bruckman says. "It is more oriented to math and art, and computer programming is a common theme through both game construction kits. So it's good for different learning goals and appeals to different kids."
There are a lot of design challenges in creating a graphical virtual world that is truly educational, Bruckman says. "We're still in the fairly early stages, but I think we've come a long way in revising the design to make it more fun," she adds. "Still, we've got a lot of engineering to do to make it possible."
When AquaMOOSE is completed, Bruckman will distribute it free of charge, just as she did with the MOOSE Crossing software. Field testing will begin in 2000 on AquaMOOSE.
History Repeats Itself
One project that excites her is student Jason Ellis' development of on-line oral histories, involving stories ranging from World War II veterans to African-Americans who lived through the civil rights era. This work involves senior adults communicating online from the Atlanta area and across the country.
The project is tentatively titled American Timewarp and is funded by IBM.
In the past year, Ellis has done pilot work in an inner city Atlanta middle school, with students interviewing senior citizens using e-mail and then developing oral histories.
Some of the seniors live in a nearby government-subsidized housing project; researchers found others online. Bringing the students and seniors together makes sense, Bruckman asserts. The problem is logistical.
"It takes a tremendous amount of energy to pull off a visit between students and seniors, and most teachers are already overwhelmed with work," Bruckman says. "Our model starts with literature — in one case a short story called 'The Golden Cadillac.' The kids generate questions based on the literature and ask the seniors questions online during the school year."
Ellis is using the lessons learned in this fieldwork to build an online community that will facilitate the development of on-line oral histories. In this community, students will put what they've learned into a Web resource to share with students from other schools, online senior adults and the public. The online community will be open in late 2000. For more information on the project, see www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/at/.
Identity Questions
But "The Turing Game" is more closely aligned with the original idea of the Turing Test, Bruckman explains. It was intended to see if a person could distinguish the differences between men and women without being able to see them — basically doing it with written responses.
Dr. Amy Bruckman is creating an intellectually engaging, graphical virtual world called AquaMOOSE 3D. It is a multi-user game construction kit for use in a shared on-line environment. AquaMOOSE3D targets middle and high school students who will learn by programming their own video games.
(300-dpi JPEG version - 344k)
"The Turing Game is kind of like that old game show called 'To Tell the Truth,' " Bruckman says. "You have a panel of people with all but one of them pretending to be something they are not. The audience asks questions via the computer, trying to determine which panelist is telling the truth."
Online players have been trying out The Turing Game recently with questions designed to reveal a panelist's gender. Here's a sample Q & A from people trying to portray women: "What's your best beauty tip? Nicky says: Mix your own concealer with Oxy10. It's a better color than the one that comes out of the bottle. Rhonda says: Always blot your lipstick with a piece of tissue." Who was really a woman? Nicky.
At the heart of this research project is the issue of on-line identity, Bruckman explains. "How is it different interacting just through text with people of different ages, races, genders? The point of the game is a participatory philosophical exploration of on-line identity," she says.
Since its posting on the Web in July 1999, The Turing Game has attracted more than 8,000 players from all seven continents. They have played more than 1,000 games, mostly on gender, but also on race, religion and age, among other topics. Participants play via an Internet-based virtual community at
www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/turing. The project is funded by Microsoft.
Other Issues to Explore
"There are some deep issues here of power and control," Bruckman says. "And as these on-line communities become a bigger part of our lives, there are real questions about who makes the decisions. Do people have rights? It's complicated.... Democracy is time consuming. We do it in the real world because it's worth it. But is it important enough in the on-line world? Maybe not."
Bruckman also wants to know the effects on individuals of community support derived on line. Many people fear that the virtual world is replacing the real world for active Internet users, but Bruckman's research shows this is not true.
"What we found uniformly is that people who were completely absorbed with the on-line world to the exclusion of the real world were people with serious pre-existing personal problems," Bruckman says of research she did several years ago with psychologist Sherry Turkle. "It is not the case that someone who had a balanced life was exposed to the technology and then went off the deep end."
On the positive side, the community support found in a virtual community can provide students with a lot of help, Bruckman says. "Community support from the virtual world is certainly a powerful tool we could learn to use more effectively," Bruckman says. "The Internet has the potential to facilitate that."
For her part, Bruckman will continue her quest to harness the Internet's power to educate and enrich.
While still a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bruckman created one of her first Internet-based virtual communities as her doctoral dissertation project.
With MOOSE Crossing operating smoothly, Bruckman and students Elizabeth Edwards, Jason Elliott and Stuart Jeff took on a new challenge a year ago — creating an intellectually engaging, graphical virtual world. This long-term project, called AquaMOOSE 3D because of its underwater theme, is funded by Intel Corporation and the National Science Foundation.
Like MOOSE Crossing, it is a multi-user game construction kit for use in a shared on-line environment. But this one operates in a three-dimensional graphical format. It targets middle and high school students who will learn by programming their own video games.
photo by Stanley Leary
As an assistant professor, Bruckman supervises and collaborates with doctoral degree students in their research projects. True to her "constructionist" philosophy, Bruckman thoroughly enjoys the interaction, she says.
Another fun project had Bruckman and student Joshua Berman designing "The Turing Game." It is based on a test of artificial intelligence called a "Turing Test." The goal was to write a computer program so good that people could not distinguish its intuitiveness from a human's.
Bruckman's research is filled with socio-political questions. In another project, she is investigating the management of deviant behavior online with graduate student Priscilla Dodds.
For more information, you may contact Dr. Amy Bruckman, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0280. (Telephone: 404-894-9222) (E-mail:
amy.bruckman@cc.gatech.edu) More information is also available at
www.cc.gatech.edu/elc.
Contents
Research Horizons GT
Research News GTRI
Georgia Tech
Send questions and comments regarding these pages to
Webmaster@gtri.gatech.edu
Last updated: February 10, 2000
