A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
Virtual Reality Situational Language Trainer for Second Language Design & Evaluation
Authors: Timo Korkalainen, Juho Pääkylä, Tapani N. Liukkonen, Lauri Järvenpää, Tuomas Mäkilä, Yrjö Lappalainen, Heli Kamppari
Editors: Sander Bakkes and Frank Nack
Conference name: International Conference on Intelligent Games and Simulations - Game-ON'2015
Publishing place: Ghent
Publication year: 2015
Book title : Game-ON'2015
Series title: Game-On
First page : 43
Last page: 47
ISBN: 978-90-77381-91-5
Use of virtual learning environments has been studied for years, but no common guidelines for evaluating them for education exist. The Developing Virtual Learning for Finnish project proposed a set of such guidelines in context of teaching a second language to immigrants. To aid the definition work and test the guidelines, a demonstrative application was created with focus on introducing the students to everyday situations and to the use of spoken language. The main objective of the game design was to create a friendly and comfortable environment, where the users would feel safe to experiment with the new language. To evaluate both the game and the initial guidelines, user experience research was conducted on actual immigrants learning Finnish as a second language. According to the questionnaire results, the game fulfilled the primary objectives and the evaluation criteria provided an insight into the usefulness of the game for learning.