Designed to make use of the immense power of World Wide Web (WWW) and facilitate a paradigm shift in education, VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment) is a new game-based situated learning paradigm which aims to enable student-centered learning taking place in a game-based interactive virtual environment Briefly speaking, the VISOLE approach is composed of 3 phases in which students have to (Phase 1) preliminarily acquire some high-level knowledge in specific subject domains through teachers' scaffolding; (Phase 2) actively participate as a game character in a game-based virtual interactive environment to construct knowledge and skills from their near real-life game-play experiences; (Phase 3) reflect and generalize their game-based learning experiences through teachers' debriefing
Under the present theoretical context of learning, digital games and game-based learning, this dissertation exploited and reinforced the VISOLE learning paradigm It also delineated the design and development of the first VISOLE game---"Farmtasia" and presented the empirical research on investigating the educational realization and accomplishment of VISOLE
Based on the specificity of educational technology research, "Development Research Method" was adopted as the methodological framework in the whole study Under this framework, a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods was employed for data collection and analysis, including the knowledge pre- and post-test, generic-skill test, perception survey, in-depth interviews as well as artifacts of students' reflective journals, reports and game-playing records All of these intensively focused on investigating students' and teachers' perceptions, students' learning motivation, behaviors, effectiveness with respect to the VISOLE approach and researching the design strategies for situated educational games
In the present research, most of the teachers and students were basically positive towards VISOLE