How to get – and especially, keep – modern, tech savvy kids interested in clinical trials and scurvy? Simple, just give them the opportunity to experience the disease for themselves. This quest leaves players stranded on a ship where they have to complete a set of challenges in order to rescue themselves. The young minds learn fast as they help the ship’s doctor cure the crew. Creating an educational game interesting and fun to keep kids playing, whilst still accurate and informational enough to teach them about clinical trial and scurvy was a very big challenge.
Rezzable created an on-line virtual questing environment to support Ytouring ’s Starfish production where students learn through questing in a 3D environment about Scurvy and Clinical Trials. Steamfish website was created to hold all the information for the students to learn more about scurvy and clinical trials also see their scores, watch videos and link to other relevant sites. After seeing Starfish audiences are invited to enter Steamfish a specially created world. First they create their own character (avatar) on the Steamfish Website . In character they arrive on board the recently ’shipwrecked’ Stella Maris. This is where they start their quest to learn more about scurvy and clinical trials. If you want to start your quest please click here to learn more at Rezzable.
The Steamfish game was developed by Rezzable as a virtual experience using Opensim technology. The Opensim platform allows for more free-form immersion in a 3D narrative environment, the ability to surround players with objects small and large to investigate for enhanced learning, and the layering of a game engine to coordinate progress and scoring. In the game, players learn about the origins and basis for clinical trials by becoming part of an alternate-history version of the Lind scurvy trial of 1748, so a number of challenges were weighted heavily to that part of the story: including visits to the doctor for diagnosis, symptom reporting, and treatment. Woven in with those elements were the kinds of quests that help restore order to the ship, and locate enough equipment and knowledge to call for rescue.
How to Get Started:
Quick Tips to Get you started on your Steamfish Quest:
- Create your avatar at Rezzable
- Download of the viewer to be able to access the 3D environment
- Click on this link to access directly to SteamFish
- Click on the panel on the left side of the door in Steamfish arrival area
- Accept the hud ( Left hand side blue panel will come down)
- Open inventory on the bottom panel and find Steamfish Hud right click to wear it
- Now You are ready to start your quest go through the doors ! Good Luck!
Designing a questing system in a 3D world to achieve a successful learning environment for 11- 15 years old Secondary school kids have been a great challenge.
Asked Fran Wilde, who is the lead builder in the project, about the challenges of designing the quest in a 3D Environment :
‘There were a couple of primary challenges in designing Steamfish. We needed to craft a storyline and a visual space that supported the quest elements and the educational goals of the project. We had to make sure the quests had a good balance of different types of actions and expectations, as well as enough imagination to make them interesting, relevant, substantive, and immersive.
A major challenge was keeping the material accurate, while keeping the experience from being dry or boring. That meant we needed to rely on all sorts of devices, from various objects that offered clothing and hints towards completing other tasks, to developing machines, tools, and dialogue that would capture the eye and the imagination. Lastly, teaching the players how the game worked, and helping them feel comfortable playing and knowledgeable about what was expected of them at every stage was important, especially because this was a new platform to many. User testing helped us define key points where additional hints were needed, quests could be refined, and signage and visual clues could help support the game play. The game HUD (Heads Up Display) that Ordinal Malaprop scripted and we designed to show health, achievements, and quest instructions – as well as other collected items; and the feedback to players developed as a narrative from elements within the game were key elements in achieving that goal.’
How do you see the virtual worlds working together with education/schools?
I think that this is one major reason why I am involved with designing interactive elements in Virtual Worlds – because the opportunity for rich, immersive, adaptive experiences and activities — no matter where a student or school is located — is so vast on this platforms. In the future, I see some virtual worlds being places that individuals and groups of learners can take private field trips to any virtual place, *at any period of time*, and engage in a set of activities that is potentially tailored to their curriculum, before going ‘home’ again to reflect on their experiences and possibly build on them in their own virtual regions. Rezzable’s ability to create a private, active region on demand for a group makes the first part of this possible now. I’m hoping that interaction becomes part of education in new ways – with both programmed aspects and live players who can move a lesson forward through a virtual experience. I think with tools like these, education groups can use virtual worlds to teach, to immerse, and to connect with their own students as well as with students and educators interested in the same topics anywhere on the planet.
Steam fish project has successfully been integrated with web and 3D environment where we created both platforms to enrich the students with learning tools and material about the given subject and at the same time encouraging them to participate in a competitive environment where they are challenged. At the end of the quest each school can check the result on the leader board to see who is leading the quest. The website opens up to endless amounts of information about the subject if the kids were to learn more in this case about Scurvy or Clinical trials. In our experience, as the young minds feel involved in the process of learning they feel more concerned about the given subject.
If you would like to learn more about the quest please sign up at Rezzable and start your quest now. If you would like to know more about what we are building in Heritage Key you can also follow us on Heritage Key Virtual
