Enabling Physical- and Concept-Walk in VRbased Open-ended Historical Learning Space

Abstract

In history study, it is desirable for students to understand the structural connections among people, events, and historical sites, and to experience the appearance, scale, and location of historical sites, rather than merely memorizing them. On the other hand, it is desirable for students to understand the connections between historical facts and to learn through actual experiences such as visiting actual historical sites. This is difficult to achieve in textbooks because of the limited amount of information that can be presented in textbooks. In this study, we propose a learning support system for exploring historical sites, which aims to achieve both immersion and independence of learners by switching between a pseudo-historical site exploration (Physical Walk) and a related term exploration (Concept Walk). We have developed a system that can follow the interests of various learners and provide a subjective and immersive learning experience by switching between a pseudo-historical site exploration (Physical Walk) and a related term exploration (Concept Walk). In this paper, we overview the system, the technical issues we used to overcome, and the results of an initial evaluation experiment of the system. In addition, we mention a more adaptive support planned to implement which generates questions based on the related terms and ontologies.