Requirements for educational support tools in Virtual Worlds

Abstract

Virtual Worlds have been used for online gaming, socialising, business advertising and education. As the educational uses become more sophisticated from early information advertising and teaching resources to simulated laboratory and scenarios, it is necessary to determine requirements for tools and virtual systems to achieve the optimal support possible. This paper discusses the current educational uses of Virtual Worlds and applies this to a set of support requirements derived for an evaluated support tool for learning to program. The result is a layered approach, or checklist, to support learning and evaluation for effective and adaptive online educational support tools including virtual world educational systems.