6/sup th/ graders "doin' science"-collecting data and looking for patterns in a virtual field

Kevin Harris' sixth grade class has a mission; they need to find out why there are more red flowers in certain areas of a large field. Mr. Harris breaks up the class into groups to explore different parts of the field. When the children come upon a flower, they place a flag in the ground to mark the spot and record its position and colour using a pocket PC that doubles as a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. They do all of this at an ImmersaDesk/sup TM/ in their school. Once all of the data is collected, the students meet as a group in their classroom to integrate and visualize it. Patterns that are not visible while collecting the data suddenly appear when that data is visualized as a whole. Using MyWorld, a geographic information system for high-school students, filters are applied to the data to make the patterns more obvious. This collaboration combines the VR educational work at the University of Illinois at Chicago with the desktop educational work at Northwestern University. It is part of a larger NSF funded project including the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech developing guidelines and an engineering process to support software developers in building effective computer-based learning environments.