TEACHER/SUPERVISOR: Jule Krüger & Chandan Dasgupta
TOPIC
Climate-related risks such as floods, droughts and heatwaves emerge from complex interactions between environmental processes, infrastructure, land use, vulnerability, and human decision-making. These dynamics are often difficult for secondary school students to understand through traditional teaching approaches alone. This project adopts a geo-techno-social perspective to help students and teachers explore and better understand the complexity of flood and heatwave risks through immersive learning experiences in the UT FieldLab Facility. Using mobile technologies and Mixed or Augmented Reality (MR/AR), the FieldLab will be enriched with interactive educational elements and offered through extracurricular activities such as project weeks, talent programmes, and masterclasses.
Guided by the Cognitive Affective Model of Immersive Learning (CAMIL; Makransky & Petersen, 2021), the Theory of Immersive Collaborative Learning (TICOL; Makransky & Petersen, 2023), and the educational framework for immersive learning (EFIL; Dengel & Mägdefrau, 2019), the project will develop a prototype technology-enabled learning experience that allows learners to manipulate environmental and decision variables, observe their effects on risk pathways, and collaboratively discuss adaptation and resilience strategies. The interdisciplinary project team includes not only IST researchers, but also a researcher from the field of hazard risk management and disaster resilience (ITC) and a junior developer for programming the experience. The project also works together with the UT FieldLab representatives and data with learners will be collected at the UT FieldLab facility.
ASSIGNMENT
As part of this project, and internship involves assignments to support the design and evaluation of the immersive learning experience on flood and drought risks for secondary school students. The intern will have the possibilities to work with teacher(s) and students, contribute to stakeholder needs analyses, co-design workshops, and develop learning activities and evaluation instruments. Based on the timing of the internship, the main focus will be on the evaluation phase of the prototype with learners in the field. A key focus will be investigating how the immersive and collaborative learning environment influences students' engagement, systems thinking, understanding of complex climate-related risks, and decision-making processes. The intern can engage in other aspects of the project as well. The internship offers hands-on experience with educational innovation, learning sciences research, mixed-methods data collection and analysis, and interdisciplinary collaboration with experts in education, climate resilience, and technology-enhanced learning.
REFERENCES
Dengel, A., & Mägdefrau, J. (2019). Presence Is the Key to Understanding Immersive Learning. In D. Beck, A. Peña-Rios, T. Ogle, D. Economou, M. Mentzelopoulos, L. Morgado, C. Eckhardt, J. Pirker, R. Koitz-Hristov, J. Richter, C. Gütl, & M. Gardner (Eds), Immersive Learning Research Network (pp. 185–198). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23089-0_14
Makransky, G., & Petersen, G. B. (2021). The Cognitive Affective Model of Immersive Learning (CAMIL): A theoretical research-based model of learning in immersive virtual reality. Educational Psychology Review, 33(3), 937–958. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09586-2
Makransky, G., & Petersen, G. B. (2023). The Theory of Immersive Collaborative Learning (TICOL). Educational Psychology Review, 35(4), 103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09822-5