A Version Control System as a tool and methodology to foster children s collaboration in spatial configuration decision tasks

Transcription

1 A Version Control System as a tool and methodology to foster children s collaboration in spatial configuration decision tasks Filipe Santos 1, Benjamim Fonseca 2, Leonel Morgado 3, Paulo Martins 3, 1 ESE, Instituto Politécnico de Leiria, Campus 1, Apartado 4045, Leiria - Portugal 2 UTAD/CITAB, Apartado 1013, Vila Real, Portugal 3 UTAD/GECAD, Apartado 1013, Vila Real, Portugal fsantos@esel.ipleiria.pt ; {benjaf ; leonelm; pmartins}@utad.pt Abstract. A growing number of research projects emphasize a culture of childhood that sees the child as an active participant in social life, and in the planning and decision processes of the spaces where they live most of their time. Typically, children are asked to have a direct role on the configuration of several spaces, such as public and school playgrounds. This paper refers to a work in progress where a version control system for a multiuser virtual world is being developed to address some of the challenges that this kind of task and participants bring. This tool is being designed and prototyped to foster children s involvement in primary school activities where a class participation and consensus are requested on the several school spatial configurations. Keywords: Virtual Worlds, Children, Groupware, Version Control System. 1 Introduction Urban Geography knowledge on man-environment relationships has long helped the planning of spaces to meet certain criteria, such as safety, beauty and economic opportunities, among others. Nevertheless, this activity has always been made by adults for adults as children have been seen as passive social actors, as the necessary competencies were seen as still not fully developed. But recently a growing number of research and projects emphasize a culture of childhood that sees the child as a competent actor in social life, as they are recognized to have the capability of constructing meanings of the world that surrounds them and make decisions [1]. Under this perspective some urban policies are already focusing on work toward a new governmental philosophy of the city, engaging the children as parameters and as guarantors of the needs of all citizens [2]. Children are participating in the planning and decision processes of spaces such as public playgrounds [3][4] or helping to define paths for walking to school autonomously [5][6]. As nowadays schools are one of the places where children spend most of their time [4][7] children are asked to have a more participative role on the decision processes about the configuration of its several spaces, such as the classroom and playground.

2 As school is also the privileged place where society expects them to learn the several competencies that they will later need for their adult life this space is also the privileged one to learn such collaborative competencies and to participate in decision making processes. School also offers a rich variety of spatial configuration decisions as many aspects of the daily school activities require spatial configurations (tents in an encampment, scenery in a theater play, etc.). Teachers may therefore use such activities in their curricula as a way to foster these competencies. An important aspect about framing these activities in school is that they mustn t collide with teachers pedagogical model as they use them within a methodology. But currently we are seeing teachers embracing more active pedagogies that lay in the notion of the competent child and where children are asked to have an active role. In Portugal one pedagogic model that is spreading and that put great emphasis in collaborative work is Portuguese Modern School Movement in which classroom activities require the student s active participation either in negotiation and decisionmaking processes or others [8][9]. Under this paradigm and perspective teachers are defining and adopting several strategies to make this collaborative process happens. This brings several difficulties as children in primary school context still need to develop the cognitive and social skills to such a collaborative process. 2 Spatial Configuration Decision Processes: Virtual Worlds as a New Medium, Tool and Methodology Multi-user Three-Dimensional Virtual Worlds (referred here simply as virtual worlds ) have been used with success in many educational scenarios and purposes [10] [11] [12]. In particular, some research has been conducted in virtual worlds as tools to mediate spatial collaboration [13][14]. By offering an excellent simulation of three-dimensional (3D) spaces. and allowing the simultaneous presence of multiple users it gives the ability for the visitor to interact with the environment people, objects, and places and to influence the course of events [11]. Therefore they may be used by teachers and children to mediate 3D spatial configuration collaboration processes with new strategies. As some of these worlds offer scripting mechanisms that allow the creation of personalized multi-user 3D applications and tools to better meet a task, methodologies can be defined to take advantage of this medium. 2.1 Empirical Observations in a Portuguese Primary School To get a deeper understanding of the context and its problematics we have began focusing our research conducting empirical studies at Amélia Vieira Luís primary school, in Lisbon, with a teacher that uses the Portuguese Modern School Movement model of pedagogy with his 2 nd year children. He promotes discussion with children on several issues that affects them as a class but as children are still learning the dynamics of such a process and competencies to use in this, it is not an auto-sustained process and the teacher still plays an important role. Therefore implementing such a process in a virtual world requires a software tool that helps the teacher under this

3 new medium. In other words, even though we propose a computer mediated democratic collaborative activity for children we must assume that the teacher still plays an important role aided by software. We also have observed that when the class is discussing a spatial configuration the teacher uses several pedagogical materials to support such an activity. The maquette is the most used one as it offers a small scale 3D version of the space that is being discussed. But one limitation of this material is that as each child collaborates, by proposing his own configuration, changes are done in the maquette that may radically change the configuration proposed by the child that intervened before him therefore destroying the vision of this child. In this sense, each child may have difficulties to believe that it gave a positive contribution to the collaborative process (if any at all) by seeing a final configuration which is possibly very different from his own. [15] Therefore, and based on several observations of the participation processes that take place in this class, we propose and describe a tool based on a version control system (VCS), that will fit to a particular methodology to address the problems and actors of such activity. 2.2 Version Control Systems as data structures In our first proposal we thought of a visual 3D interface component that could help children understanding abstract notions such as collaboration and a decision making process by metaphorically giving them a concrete representation in the virtual world. A collaboration process, being a dynamic abstract entity that evolves over time, should have a visible interface so that it shows children a concrete existence. Inspired on a successful version control system that helps communities collaborate and reaching consensus, the one at the core of Wikipedia, we have thought of how one could be adapted for 3D media content. As we, and to the best of our knowledge, haven t found version control systems for collaborative 3D spaces for such context and actors we have proposed therefore a version control system under the form of an historic tool that would the several versions of a space proposed by children during a collaboration process to be saved and managed in a linear tree data structure which could be represented visually (fig.1). Fig. 1. A linear tree representing several versions of the configuration of a space. One promising methodology for using such a mechanism is starting by an initial configuration (the r root) and give children a sequential order for suggesting small changes to that configuration. These successive changes would constitute new versions which would then be saved under each child s name (fig.1 assumes that 4 children, A, B, C and D are intervening). As this Version tree may be used to represent the three time notions that children know well - past, present and future it was well accepted by the teacher for conducting such activity. Therefore a linear

4 visual element can be used pedagogically as it is visually shown to children that a collaboration process is a dynamic process that evolves over time. 2.3 Version Control Systems as a tool to promote confrontation Also, and as we have observed, as children are in a cognitive development stage where they lack some of the necessary competences to the negotiation processes, such a methodology and strategy must be simple, and more demanding user requisites which were later demanded can be difficult to solve with a simple linear structure. Our next step was then to define how to visually represent complex information of such a complex process with such a simple structure. One complexity of the process is egocentrism: young children have difficulties in giving up their own perspective as they do not totally understand the relations that involve giving and receiving [16]. Therefore a mechanism where different versions could be easily confronted to promote discussion was necessary (fig. 2). Fig. 2. Confrontation of two versions. We found the time travel metaphor appealing as it didn t break the linear version tree philosophy which we think is easily understood by children. The teacher can use such tool to take children in a time travel visit to a previous 3D configuration and where discussion by confrontation with the current version - can be encouraged. We also found that version confrontation is, perhaps, the module on the prototype which is more significative pedagogically, as many school pedagogical models use the notion of confrontation to achieve a better learning. As will be discussed in point 3 studies have to be made, from the pedagogy researcher point of view, on the best solution from the ones we propose. 2.4 Version Control Systems as a tool to manage errors Along our observations we have also inquired the teacher for user requisites and studied how they could (or could not) be met by the version control structure. One requisite the teacher asked - as it was already used by the teacher in his classroom collaborative processes with high success was the most challenging for our team, as it disrupted the notion of a linear version tree: the consensus points (fig. 3). Under this methodology the teacher and children identify at a certain point of the discussion that the collaboration process has reached a dead end (a situation where a consensus is not possible) and jointly decide to use the time travel possibility to travel back to a point where the discussion was doing well to fork the future from

5 that point. This means that new editions (spatial configurations) could be made from that point, creating a new line of states in the future. Fig. 3. Definition of a consensus point in a past version, where a new future is defined This feature brought complexity to the process and we studied ways to design for not bringing more entropy to the process increasing exponentially the number of configurations: on the contrary, it should be a way that the teacher uses precisely when entropy is becoming visible. Under this perspective we have decided that the version tree should continue to be linear. Therefore the future isn t seen as forked: the future is seen as a path that is erased and another one is created and continued in a new line of thought. This was our proposal to represent a necessary complex tree data structure in a simple representation in the virtual world. Forking may demand an excessive cognitive load for small children. Our task was, therefore and concluding, to define a 3D version control interface that would be based in linear trees in a way that children see clearly just the representation of the 3 time points they know intuitively past, present and future. 2.5 Framework proposal Fig 4 shows the framework developed for a tool and methodology to help the teacher manage the decision making process. It is, as discussed, based on a Control Version System which is called the historic following the metaphor of a time travel line. The teacher has access to a history management tool as he/she wants to take children back in time to version confrontation. Therefore a confrontation module is responsible for showing children the two chosen versions for comparison. In practice this module may be implemented on the prototype in several pedagogical ways, either by showing two versions side-by-side (splitting the user screen 50%-50%) or by showing just one world with the objects of a version clearly marked and the objects of the other version having some degree of transparency (as if they were ghost objects from the past). More studies need to be conducted in this matter to see what will be the confrontation module strategy more suitable for small children. Also this strategy asks for some mechanisms that prevent concurrent editing, as each child wants to feel that he/she is the solo author of the configuration/version he's/she's proposing. The teacher has, for this issue, a concurrency management tool that, gives the active child a token (it may be a pleasurable object as a magic wand) that gives him/her editing privileges. We see in fig. 4 that the child in the middle is the one with write privileges in the world while the others are mere spectators of the

6 editing task ( read privileges). After the child finishes his/her proposal, the spatial configuration is saved as a version and added into the historic tool. Fig. 4. Final framework for a tool and methodology based on a VCS 3 Prototype implementation Currently there are several platforms that allow or facilitate the creation of 3D Virtual Worlds. For the implementation of the prototype we have chosen the OpenCroquet [17] software development environment, as it offers a set of characteristics that were appealing to our project. Built in its core for synchronous peer-to-peer applications, it offers a large set of classes designed especially for virtual world creation which reduced the time needed to deliver a functional prototype. The supported decentralized peer-to-peer based network architecture is appealing as most primary schools in Portugal don t have a dedicated server to their projects. Finally, as it is open source, it can be distributed freely to all schools that manifest interest in it. Fig. 5 shows a screenshot of the developed prototype where children and teacher interact as avatars with the 3D models of objects in the playground. As explained before the teacher s avatar has special privileges, as he has the responsibility to manage all the activity. No chatting/communication mechanisms are required to mediate the communication as this environment is to be used in presence scenarios, inside the class: teacher and children are in the same physical space and communicate face to face it is just the editing process that is technologically mediated. The version control system is visually interfaced in the virtual world as a linear tree, representing past, present and future states (fig 6). As we can see, the version tree interfaces the virtual world as a sequence of iconic spherical buttons that by lining up give the impression of a time line. Each iconic button will hold the avatar face of the child that edited the configuration.

7 Fig. 5. Children and teacher interact as avatars in the prototype. Fig. 6. A version tree in an initial stage of a discussion process. This visual representation of the tree is needed as it is both the tool the teacher uses to travel back in time and it is the concrete visualization of abstract concepts collaboration, discussion and flow processes which help young children learn some of the intrinsic complexities of a collaboration process. We have also found that the coloring of the spheres of the tree, representing the 3 time states, can be used pedagogically. We have represented the past in blue, the present in yellow and the future in green. This is most useful in the time travel pedagogical strategy as a child, accessing a past version may have difficulty in understanding where he/she is in the present (fig. 7): Fig. 7. A voyage to the past visually represented in the tree structure. As seen in the figure we have represented the present as being the version where the class truly is in that given moment. Under this perspective, all the following versions are represented in green representing future versions from the point where the children and teacher stand at that moment. 4 Conclusions and future work In this article we have presented a version control system for virtual worlds which was specially designed to mediate and support collaboration processes that involve spatial configurations in a classroom activity. We have used a visual linear tree that simplifies the collaboration process (that normally could be represented by complex tree data structures) and more easily understandable by children in primary schools. We intended to use linear trees as metaphors for processes such as collaboration that evolve dynamically over time and are therefore easily represented by linear past, present and future states. We also expect that such a visual element, used in the activity, may help children comprehend some of the dynamics and skills needed for an abstract concept collaboration by turning it into a concrete object which can be seen and interacted with visually.

8 The version tree also helps the pedagogy of confrontation as it allows the comparison of different proposed spaces through the time travel metaphor. We believe therefore that this data structure is in one of the simplest forms possible to use as a version control mechanism with pedagogical purposes, although we don t close the door yet on the possibility of testing in a latter phase more complex non-linear trees. We are currently modelling several 3D aspects of the school infrastructure into the virtual world and debugging/testing the prototype in lab conditions to finally begin the testing phase with children. We expect to have the first results by the end of the year. References 1. Lourenço, O.: Psicologia de desenvolvimento cognitivo (2ª Ed.). Almedina, Coímbra (2002) 2. The City of Children, 3. Ferré, M. B., Guitart, A. O., Ferret, M. P.: Children and Playgrounds in Mediterranean Cities. Children s Geographies. Vol. 4, No. 2, (2006) 4. Unicef Innocenti Research Centre: Cities with Children Child Friendly Cities in Italy. Unicef, Siena (2005) 5. The City of Children Rissotto, A., Tonucci, F.: Freedom of Movement and Environmental Knowledge in Elementary School Children. Journal of Environmental Psychology. 22, (2002) 7. Sarmento, T., Marques, J.: A Participação das Crianças nas Práticas de Relação das Famílias com as Escolas. Interacções 2, (2006) 8. Niza, S.: O Modelo Curricular de Educação Pré-Escolar da Escola Moderna Portuguesa. In: Formosinho, J. O. (ed.) Modelos Curriculares para a Educação de Infância, (2nd ed.). pp , Porto Editora, Porto, (1998). 9. Grave-Resendes, L., Soares, J.: Diferenciação Pedagógica. Universidade Aberta, Lisboa (2002) 10.Dickey, M. D: Three-Dimensional Virtual Worlds and Distance Learning: Two Case Studies of Active Worlds as a Medium for Distance Education. British Journal of Educational Technology. 36 (3): (2005) 11.Johnson, L. F., Levine, A. H. Virtual Worlds: Inherently Immersive, Highly Social Learning Spaces. Theory Into Practice, 47:2, , (2008) 12. Dickey, M. D.: Teaching in 3D: Pedagogical Affordances and Constraints of 3D Virtual Worlds for Synchronous Distance Learning', Distance Education, 24:1, (2003) 13. Ch. Bouras, Ch. X3D Multi-user Virtual Environment Platform for Collaborative Spatial Design, 27th International Conference on distributes Computing Systems Workshops, (2007) 14. W. Schafer, D. Bowman, Integrating 2D and 3D views for spatial collaboration, Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, pp (2005) 15. Santos, F., Fonseca, B., Morgado, L., Martins, P.: Children as Active Partners: Strategies for Collaboration in Spatial Tasks through Virtual Worlds. In: Sixth International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing, pp (2008) 16. Selman, R., Selman, A.: Children s ideas about friendship: a new theory, Psychology Today, October, , OpenCroquet,