Analysis and Design of Collaborative STEM Learning Based on a 2D Virtual Environment in Teacher Team Delivery

Abstract

With the Thai government and education policy investigating ways to drive Thailand towards an innovative and creatively based society, STEM education has become increasingly an important learning method. Typically, STEM education implementation requires teachers to be expert in STEM areas to helps to bridge the gaps sometimes found in STEM-related fields. Moreover, STEM educators have increasingly sought to explore tools and techniques to enable creating suitable approaches to promote STEM engagement. Simultaneously, two-dimensional virtual environments have been applied in various disciplines and areas of study. This has led to the essential approach - how is a 2D virtual environment developed and how does it handle delivering and supporting collaborative STEM learning and communication between STEM students and STEM- related field teachers? The aim of this project is to collaborate with learning processes across different STEM learning fields. In this work we describe the development and deployment of a 2D virtual environment tool to bring diverse STEM teacher teams and STEM students to learning together. This project proposes an interactive multimedia STEM instructional module developed to provide a delivering and supporting collaborative STEM learning and communication between STEM students, and STEM-related field teachers. This module was built following the interaction design principle to create instructional material for learning based on 2D virtual environment in teacher team delivery. Unity was used to create the 2D virtual environment and containing a learning digital media, control learning digital media using C#. This project can support those who teach STEM and those who are considering collaborating with learning processes across different STEM learning fields. Besides, the student results summary report indicated an improvement in STEM learning and learning accomplishments of content for five instructional objectives.