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Fig. 3.2
Gear graphic simulation with movement (joystick and gears) and animation with force
feedback (joystick)
tank and also in the large remote one by a controlling robot arm. Thus, this situa-
tion provides considerable embodiment, but student learning and understanding was
increased when a graphic computer simulation was added for the fish tank where the
student could directly manipulate the variables involved (e.g., the temperature of the
water) and observe animations of the results on other components of the fish tank
ecology. The interpretation of these results is that the graphical computer simulation
involving movement and animation helped the students form the mental grounded
perceptual simulations that they need for better learning and understanding.
Creating Video Games to Embody Understanding
In the Teachable Agent (TA) project (Schwartz, Blair, Biswas, Leelalong, & Davis,
2007) and the Reflective Agent Learning (REAL) environment project (Bai &
Black, 2010) students learn by specifying what their agents know in a video-game-
like virtual world, then get feedback by how well their agents do in the virtual world
with the knowledge the students have given them. In the TA project, agent Betty is
given knowledge about something like river ecology by the students studying that
topic and then drawing a concept map that gives both propositional relations (e.g.,
fish have gills) and system functional relations (e.g., increasing the number of plants
