The meeting of disciplines, a resource
The Percro team of researchers brings us varied examples of experience in the field of education and offers us various routes of experimentation.
The necessary condition is, however, that there is a full collaboration between the world of school and the world of computer research, to design paths that are targeted and therefore didactically valid. Everything must be well concerted in the smallest details, planning the learning objectives that must be modulated on the physiognomy of the school receiving the intervention. Teachers and learners meet to build models of experimentation that truly take into account the real educational needs of a given educational reality, school or class with which you intend to undertake a particular path. The key to effective implementation is therefore only and always interdisciplinarity, a crossroads of knowledge that is a necessary step for the creation of new skills, not only for those who learn but also for those who teach.
Experiences between technology and didactics
During the more than ten years of experience of Marcello Carrozzino and his collaborators, the continuous contact with local schools of all levels and the experimentation and alternative didactic paths designed side by side with the teachers are strongly emphasized, as evidenced by the rich literature reported on the site of the laboratory Percro.
One of Percro's spin-offs, "Mnemosyne", has been working for years in the field of cultural heritage (see the website for activities aimed at recovering the use and enhancement of the artistic and historical heritage of the city of Pisa) and in the field of teaching, in close contact with schools. His site documents many activities, such as the invention of an "ideal school" of the middle school "Galileo Galilei" in Cecina, which has experienced the interaction between a philosophical path designed to understand the effects of environments on personal experiences, a technological one to learn some methods of construction of virtual environments, a purely creative one managed and designed by a teacher curriculum.
Another example is that of the "Newbery" School in Marina di Pisa, where Chiara Evangelista and Veronica Neri developed with the children of a third and fourth grade the theme of Olympus and myth through the use of the technique of digital storytelling. The children have told stories and combined images made by them that move in three-dimensional perspectives, acquiring different skills ranging from knowing how to tell, to knowing how to translate into images the story, to knowing how to manage some techniques related to the use of the computer.
The Digital Serious Game as an educational approach
Another theme is the educational use of the game: the serious game (the so-called "serious game") is another aspect of the research. It is not a question of looking for a virtual environment that causes dangerous divisions from reality or results in some addiction, as sometimes happens in online games, but a possible perspective for learning at all levels and at all ages. Proof of this is the experiment of Law Ville, a game designed for learning the Constitution in a high school where the objective is to exploit the reconstruction of a "real" situation to create scenarios where to put into practice, with the technique of problem-solving, the functioning of political institutions, the process of laws, the election of the prime minister and so on.
The Digital Serious Game is based on the construction of a virtual reality that does not necessarily have to be adherent to reality, but that must be an opportunity for different learning. Here, for example, the opportunity is given by a future Italy in which an unknown and evil virus has hit the population making it hostile to politics and young people, alone to be immune from the virus, can access the highest offices of the State. In the simulation of a crisis, young people are called upon to make decisions, to learn by doing, and thus to overcome the levels of the game4.
At this point it is clear that the fusion and interaction of different disciplines is the fundamental feature of this field of research: there are opportunities arising from the latest expressions of research on robotics that, from the union with the humanities more variously intersected and involved, give creative answers that the same researchers call "not imagined before".
Various levels of virtual environment and perspectives
It should not be forgotten that there are various levels of the virtual environment or virtual reality that constitute a complex technology in which you feel completely immersed in the scene, interacting with other users and with the same environment: immersion, interaction and presence are its essential characteristics.
A low level is constituted by the MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) which are the online role-playing games diffused since 2000 in which there is no immersion5, a more involving level is that of the Digital Serious Game or of the virtual desktop reality of which the 3D web is a form of 3d not immersive but which provides virtual scenarios easily usable as learning support with a "high level of communicative interaction".
Total immersion is much more complex and is represented by the so-called Cave, places where you can make almost total interactions with a "different" reality. Since 2012 in Pisa there is the X-Cave, a real magic room of 16 square meters built by researchers of Percro, where the walls and the floor are made up of screens that reflect three-dimensional images in high definition in progressive improvement with the inclusion of effects that will involve all the senses will be able to give a greater degree of realism to those who venture there.
The most significant exceptional feature of this room of wonders is that it can be used by those who want to learn, by the school: not only a wunderkammer destined to amaze, as the collections of strange and wonderful objects of ancient times but system created for experimentation that can be made available for educational reflection and education.
Ultimately, the teachers have the responsibility and the opportunity to make a choice.
Meanwhile, Grosseto is looking forward to a new season of collaboration with the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, putting in place projects that will involve teachers and children of the city and the area.