Long version description of  3D IVT 
3D Interactive Virtual Training for Early Career Teachers

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.

Technical challenges are to design and implement a 3D virtual environment in which:
  • 30 semi-realistic diverse 3D children avatars,
  • situated in two 3D  virtual classrooms (1st and 6th grade),
  • disrupt peer students by misbehaving (e.g. off task, aggressive),
  • acting out realistic facial expressions and gestures,
  • according to vignettes providing realistic  scenarios of  students’ behavior sequences;
and in which:
  • novice teachers are asked to chose scenarios (e.g. give the student more time for the assigned task),
  • to learn from their mistake if their choice worsen the sequence of events, 
  • practice their skills  on low-end computers affordable for teachers, and
  • have an enjoyable and engaged experience all along, 
  • via a usable website accessible 24/7.
Psychological challenges are to:
  • enable inexperienced early career teachers in high poverty school to hone their behavior management skills,
  • provide teachers hands-on practice exercises on behavior management with disruptive virtual students,
  • facilitate a higher dose of active learning, and
  • accelerate the rate at which teachers develop their behavior management skills in the classroom.

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:
  • of various ethnic groups such as african descent and latinos, 
  • of different shape and sizes, 
  • with realistic hairstyles,
  • with varied skin colors, 
  • with school uniforms of blue shirts with kaki pants.
 Click on an avatar to navigate our Avatar Gallery.  Created  by D. Brito.

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.
You can also control the camera angle displays to gauge (and record) best scene angles, either using the Arrow Keys or entering coordinates in the text boxes to control the camera angle directly (see 3x2 text boxes upper right screen corner when navigating the classroom in UnityWebPlayer)​​.
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

Picture​Psychology Team Principal Investigator
Dr. Elisa Shernoff
Assistant Professor
Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology
Rutgers University

Computer science team

PictureComputer Science Team Principal Investigator
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
Picture​Psychology Team Co Principal Investigator
Dr. Stacey Frazier
Associate Professor 
Department of Psychology
Florida International University
​
 Picture
Dr. Mihai Polceanu
Research Associate 
Affective Social Computing Laboratory
Florida International University
email: mpolcean(at)cs.fiu.edu
​