Educational Scenario Testing and its Data Mining in the Immersive 3D Virtual Reality Environment

Nowadays there is no doubt in the effectiveness of 3D computer-aided software that is run within the learning process at schools, universities and trainings. Moreover, the 3D concept together with the full immersion of pupils into the learning environment might be the way to increase learner's motivation. That is why the immersive 3D Virtual Reality environment (CAVE-like system) seems to be a very entertaining, interesting and encouraging technology to use in the learning process, thus to increase its educational outcome. The process of developing education scenarios for the above-mentioned environment showed the need of a real teacher. Who is able not only stimulate and help students to use the information and knowledge they already have in the brain, but also to be as close as possible to each other in order to share concrete experiences directly through active learning. In addition, the teacher has to navigate a student through, assess his/her gained knowledge and control the educational process. This research work involves the pedagogical ideas of active learning, as well as the roles of a teacher in the active learning and technical implementation of educational scenarios in the environment. So, technically a human teacher can be physically allocated anywhere and be connected with the environment, where he is presented by an avatar. For current and future student generations an avatar is the familiar way of human presence in the computer games and different digital learning applications. The immersive 3D Virtual Reality environment allows saving the logs of its users, which gives us a great opportunity to create a database to mine the data about learners behaviour in the particular educational scenario. It is considered as an important issue of this work because the analysis of data can be practically used by both teachers and application developers. It is assumed in this research work that the data received from the environment would allow teachers to monitor the process of gaining knowledge by students, the pedagogists would be able to correct the scenario and unify it for different learning subjects, and, as a result, the software developers will bring it to life.