Stephanie E. August, Allison Neyer, Matthew J. Shields, James Vales, and Michele Hammers
Loyola Marymount University
Rather than waiting for students to pursue STEM education, virtual worlds and games can be used to bring science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to the students through engaging and socially oriented activities. One approach to this is to develop a virtual science museum and education center that provides virtual practice with basic engineering concepts and transforms an entertainment-based platform into a delivery vehicle for electrical engineering and computer science content. A second approach is to introduce AI algorithms with scaffolding in the form of a set of structured and graduated laboratory experiments as students play and develop a computer game or explore the creation of automated docents in virtual learning laboratory. Both approaches offer students autonomy and immediate feedback, and are designed to attract women and other diverse audiences to engineering and computer science. We present progress to date on two projects, the Virtual Engineering Sciences Learning Lab (VESLL) and Teaching AI as a Laboratory Science (TAILS), which implement these two approaches and discuss results from a preliminary user workshop.