October 27, 2009 –
KarunaTree image by ICS student Caroline Wagenaar.
In narrative storytelling, time and place are key elements, and actions always have consequences. In children’s stories particularly, the main character usually outwits the villain or otherwise overcomes obstacles, leading him or her safely into the arms of a happy ending.
CALIT2 researchers Bill Tomlinson and Derek Lyons are incorporating those ingredients into an interactive online platform that they think can help children understand the notion of long-term environmental disasters and learn to offset them, ultimately creating their own happy endings.
Tomlinson, informatics associate professor, and Lyons, assistant project scientist, are funded by a two-year, $280,000 NSF EAGER grant that provides funds for exploratory research.
They are developing an approach called spatiotemporal anchoring, which connects actions and events that occur online to a specific time and space in the real world. This approach, the two researchers hope, will teach children to think in a more abstract way, one which spans time and space.
“The question of why a particular ecosystem is broken is very difficult to understand because it doesn’t relate only to the here-and-now; it encompasses a more distributed set of factors,” Lyons says. “So we’re trying to combine the ‘in-the-moment’ quality of storytelling with the much more abstract concepts of distributed causation.”
Tomlinson is experienced at developing computer platforms that can benefit the environment. Previous projects include EcoRaft, an interactive experience designed to help children learn about restoration ecology; a carbon footprint calculator; and FEST, the Firefox Environmental Sustainability Toolkit, which connects online services to environmental databases. He also authored a book – “Greening through IT” – that will be published next April.
Lyons, who has a doctorate in cognitive psychology, brings to the project an understanding of effectively educating young children.
The two are currently brainstorming about their finished product, which they’ve named KarunaTree. The word karuna dervies from Pali/Sanskrit, and refers to the concept of compassion, Lyons says. “For me, the name KarunaTree denotes an image of growing compassion that reflects the project’s fundamental mission, which is to plant ‘seeds’ of compassion and caring with kids. We hope to teach them to consider the ways in which their actions radiate outwards to influence the environment.”
One option under consideration: a sea-otter virtual ecosystem, in which each player would “inhabit” a specific grid of ocean off the California coast. Each habitat would contain different elements – some positive, like sea otters, kelp and shells, and some negative, like trash or chemical runoff.
Each player’s virtual space will be affected by his/her actions in the real world.
If a player spends an afternoon picking up trash in his neighborhood or recycling her family’s cans and bottles, s/he will earn items that can keep his or her virtual space healthy. If the player doesn’t engage in positive real-world activities, the virtual space may get polluted, causing the sea otters to leave it.
“It’s important that kids learn both to change their own behavior and to work together to create large-scale benefits,” Tomlinson says.
Although they’re still hammering out the project’s ultimate design, they envision it as a cross between Google Earth and Webkinz. They want kids to “see” the elements occupying their section of the environment, and become motivated to behave in ways that will benefit their space and the environment-at-large.
A key component of the effort is changing the popular perception of computers as portals to sedentary activity. Instead, they are creating ways to integrate the machines into an activity-oriented world.
“The back and forth between the virtual and real worlds is important,” says Lyons. “It’s not a completely virtual experience; kids will go out and do things in the real world that will then feed back into the system.”
At the end of the two-year grant, Tomlinson and Lyons expect to have a working, Web browser-capable, multiplayer game that incorporates state science content standards. They also hope to boast a fun, hands-on way to teach children important lessons.
“People are not really very good at dealing with long stretches of time or space. We’re more interested in immediate threats,” Tomlinson says. “Maybe by starting to help young children perceive scale as an important piece of any given system, we can help that generation become better able to handle those kinds of problems than we are.”
Adds Lyons: “By cultivating these habits of thought and action early in childhood, we hope to help nurture more responsible environmental behavior in future generations.”
