Brief description
The Interactive Virtual Training (IVT) is multi-institution interdisciplinary research project funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), a part of the U.S. Department of Education (see below for team information).
Our research goals are to design, program, and evaluate the effectiveness of early career teachers’ interactions with a 3D virtual classroom occupied by 3D interactive virtual students simulating disruptive children, as a training practice opportunity for novice teachers on how to manage a disrupted classroom before the novice start teaching. The traning is tailored to simulate classroom from poor neighborhoods, one helps to learn by interacting with 1st-2nd grade virtual students, and another helps with 6th-7th grade students.
Our research goals are to design, program, and evaluate the effectiveness of early career teachers’ interactions with a 3D virtual classroom occupied by 3D interactive virtual students simulating disruptive children, as a training practice opportunity for novice teachers on how to manage a disrupted classroom before the novice start teaching. The traning is tailored to simulate classroom from poor neighborhoods, one helps to learn by interacting with 1st-2nd grade virtual students, and another helps with 6th-7th grade students.
Technical challenges are to design and implement a 3D virtual environment in which:
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Psychological challenges are to:
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3-dimensional virtual classroom and children
1st-2nd Grade Classroom
During year 1 of this project, the computer science team has:
- built 3D model of the classroom with realistic dimensions, proportion with respect to the children, and realistic lights
- built 3D models of objects in the classroom
- extracted and reduced the object polygons to a minimum for low-end computing
- created the texture maps of the objects in the classroom
- designed and built customized furniture, school supplies,
- enabled user navigation within the 3D space with keyboard keys (see instructions below to tour the 3D classroom),
- provided game designer camera angle displays (see six (3x2) text boxes upper right screen corner) to gauge best scene angles, either using the keyboard keys or entering coordinates in the text boxes to control the camera angle directly.
Avatar of 6-7 year old children
We also designed and created fifteen (15) avatars of 1st / 2nd grade students, or 6-7 year old children:
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Click on an avatar to navigate our Avatar Gallery. Created by D. Brito.
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Tour the classroom...
Below, you can tour the 3D classroom, empty or occupied with 1st grade students. To move around the scene, use your keyboard Arrow Keys keys “W”, “A”, “S”, and “D”. The Arrow Keys rotate the camera, whereas the “W”, “A”, “S”, and “D” enable you to accelerate in different directions:
- the “W” key to move forward,
- the “A” key to go left,
- the “S” key to go back, and
- the “D” key to go right.
Room customized with furniture, school supplies, room dimensions
designed by G. Ruiz |
Room with 1st grade students
designed by G. Ruiz, D. Brito and S. Bolivar |
Storyboarding of behavior-management vignettes
Scenario storyboarding
Some of the vignettes have been storyboarded: the vignette 1.3 storyboard can be navigated by clicking here.
Meet the IVT Interdisciplinary research team
IVT is a multi-institution interdisciplinary research project between a team of researchers in:
- Computer science (FIU PI: C. Lisetti, FIU Research Associate: M. Polceanu)
- Education and Psychology (Rutgers Univ., PI: E. Shernoff, FIU Co-PI: S. Frazier)
Main Contacts
Psychology and education team![]() Dr. Elisa Shernoff
Assistant Professor Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology Rutgers University |
Computer science team![]() Dr. Christine Lisetti
Associate Professor School of Computing and Information Sciences Florida International University Director, Affective Social Computing Laboratory Email: lisetti(at)cis.fiu.edu |
![]() Dr. Stacey Frazier
Associate Professor Department of Psychology Florida International University |
![]() Dr. Mihai Polceanu
Research Associate Affective Social Computing Laboratory Florida International University email: mpolcean(at)cs.fiu.edu |