Aproximación a los recursos y capacidades

The Fire Safety Project would benefit from an examination of the way hazard zapping is handled. While the current method works better than the original implementation it is still difficult and frustrating for users. In addition the hazard identification game could be

improved by scripting several possible locations for each hazard and assigning them at random so that hazards do not show up in the same location on successive runs of the

program. The fire escape scenario could be expanded to include more locations, possibly not starting from a hazard that has been removed from the environment. Adding an intelligent agent to the application may do a better job of replicating the experience of having a firefighter as a guide without the frustrations associated with passive observation of the environment. Fire safety is a difficult skill to test in children because they may not ever need the skills and if they should find themselves in a fire emergency they either are prepared or they are not. Hopefully those children that participated in this program are better prepared in the case of a fire event in their home; the immersive VR experience is not one that children are likely to forget.

APPENDIX EVALUATION INSTRUMENTS

This Section contains the survey that was used in the first implementation of the Fire Safety project. Following that is the quiz that was used to evaluate each student’s fire safety baseline and what they had learned during training in the second iteration of the project. Also

Fire-Safety Virtual Training Survey

1. Gender

Girl Boy

2. What is your age?

3. How much you learned about fire safety during this training program? (1: nothing

at all, 5: a lot)

1 2 3 4 5

4. Did you ever feel frightened while in the fire scenes in the CAVE? (1: not at all; 5: a

lot)

1 2 3 4 5

5. Circle the words that describe how you felt during the training in the CAVE.

Sad Happy Nervous Interested Scared Excited Sick Dizzy Fun Awesome

6. Circle the types of fire safety training you have had.

Talk with Pictures Video or TV Reading a Book Virtual Reality CAVE None of them

7. Which of the following fire safety training approaches do you like best?

Talk with Pictures Video or TV Reading a Book

8. What was the most importance thing you learned in the fire safety training program today?

9. What do you like the most about fire safety training in the CAVE?

Fire Safety Quiz Directions: Complete each sentence.

1. What is the most common type of household fire? ___________________

2. _______________ is the time of day when most cooking related fires happen.

3. It is important that you have working _______________ detectors in your home.

4. Most house fires take place in the ____________________.

5. Never use the ____________________ to go downstairs during a fire. Directions: Read each statement. Decide which statements are true and which statements are false.

T F 1. You should have an escape plan, but it is okay not to

practice.

T F 2. Your family should have a meeting place a safe distance

from your home.

T F 3. It is important to know how to operate all windows and doors

in your house.

T F 4. It is okay to only know one way out of a room in your house.

T F 5. Floor coverings can help you navigate in a room filled with

smoke.

List 5 examples of fire hazards. 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

If you are in a room that is filling with smoke what is the first thing you should do?

Fire-Safety Training Survey

1. Gender

Girl Boy

2. What is your age?

3. How much do you think you learned about fire safety during this program? (1: nothing at all, 5: a lot)

1 2 3 4 5

4. Did you ever feel frightened while in the fire scenes in the CAVE? (1: not at all; 5: a lot)

1 2 3 4 5

5. How easy was it to use the VR application?(1: very hard; 5: very easy)

1 2 3 4 5

6. What was the most important thing you learned in the fire safety training program today?

7. What did you like the most about fire safety training in the CAVE?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahrens, M. (2004). Understanding America's Fire Problem. In A. E. Cote, Fundamentals of Fire Protection (pp. 62-100). Quincy, MA: NFPA.

Bell, J. T., & Fogler, H. S. (1999). Virtual Laboratory Accidents Designed to Increase Safety Awareness. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference. Charlotte, NC: American Society for Engineering Education.

Bell, J. T., & Fogler, H. S. (2001). Virtual Reality Laboratory Accidents. ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition: Peppers, Papers, Pueblos, and Professors, (pp. 24-27). Albuquerque, NM.

Bruck, D. (2001). The who, what, where, and why of waking to fire alarms: a review. Fire Safety Journal , 623-639.

Bukowski, R., & Séquin, C. (1997). The FireWalk System: fire modeling in interactive virtual environments. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Fire Research and Engineering, (pp. 72-83). Gaithersburg, MD.

Cameron, D. (2002, July - December). Playing serious games in journalism classes. Asia Pacific Media Educator .

Comeau, E. (n.d).Campus Fire Safety. Fire and Life Safety Education, 95-106.

http://www.nfpa.org/assets/files/PDF/Research/FPHcampusfiresafety.pdf

Elliott, J., Adams, L., & Bruckman, A. (2002). No magic bullet: 3D video games in

education. Proceedings of ICLS 2002. Seattle, WA: International Conference of the Learning Sciences.

Haller, M., Kurka, G., Volkert, J., & Wagner, R. (1999). omVR - A Safety Training System for a Virtual Refinery. Proc. of ISMCR 99, Topical Workshop on Virtual Reality and

Advanced Human Robot Systems, (pp. 291-198). Tokyo.

Henderson, J. V. (2005). The Virtual Terrorism Response Academy: Training for High-Risk, Low-Frequency Threats. Stud Health Technol Inform, 111, 185-190.

Holmes, G. A., & Jones, R. T. (1996). Fire Evacuation Skills: Cognitive-Behavioral vs. Computer-Mediated Instruction. Fire Technology , 50-64.

Jones, R. T., & Randall, J. (1994). Rehearsal-plus: Coping with fire emergencies and reducing fire-related fears. Fire Technology , 432-444.

Jones, R. T., Kazdin, A. E., & Haney, J. I. (1981). Social Validation and Training of Emergency Fire Safety Skills for Potential Injury Prevention and Life Saving. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 14 (3), 249-260.

Karter, M. J. (2004). Fire loss in the United States during 2003. Quincy, MA: National Fire Protection Association, Fire Analysis and Research Division.

Katz, S., Lesgold, A., Eggan, G., & Greenburg, L. (1996). Towards the design of more effective advisors for learning-by-doing systems. Proceedings of Intellingent Tutoring Systems. Montreal.

Kaufmann, H., Schmalstieg, D., & Wagner, M. (2000). Construct3D: A Virtual Reality Application for Mathematics and Geometry Education. Education and Information Technologies , 263-276.

Ketelhut, D. J., Dede, C., Clarke, J., & Nelson, B. (2006). A multi-user virtual environment for building higher order inquiry skills in science. Paper presented at the American

Educational Research Association. San Francisco.

Kime, C. H. (2004). Preventing Fire Loss. In A. E. Cote, Fundamentals of Fire Protection

(pp. 236-272). Quincy, MA: NFPA.

Kizil, M. S., & Joy, J. (2001). What can Virtual Reality do for Safety? St. Lucia QLD: University of Queensland.

Lepouras, G., & Vassilakis, C. (2005). Virtual museums for all: employing game technology for edutainment. Virtual Reality , 96-106.

Li, L., Zhang, M., Xu, F., & Liu, S. (2005). ERT-VR: an immersive virtual reality system for emergency rescue. Virtual Reality , 194-197.

Lu, J., Pan, Z., Lin, H., Zhang, M., & Shi, J. (2005). Virtual learning environment for medical education based on VRML and VTK. Computers and Graphics, 29 (2), 283-288. McAllister, D. K. (2000). The Design of an API for Particle Systems. UNC Computer Science Tech Report.

Mungai, D., Jones, D., & Wong, L. (2002). Games to Teach By. Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning. Madison, WI.

Ohlsson, S., Moher, T., & Johnson, A. (2000). Deep Learning in Virtual Reality: How to Teach Children that the Earth is Round. 22nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, (pp. 364-368). Philadelphia, PA.

Padgett, L. S., Strickland, D., & Coles, C. D. (2006). Case Study: Using a Virtual Reality Computer Game to Teach Fire Safety Skills to Children Diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Journal of Pediatric Psychology Advance Access, 31, 65-70.

Pehrson, R. (2004). Fire Behavior. In A. E. Cote (Ed.), Fundamentals of Fire Protection (pp. 101-133). Quincy, MA: NFPA.

Ponder, M., Herbelin, B., Molet, T., Schertenlieb, S., Ulicny, B., Papagiannakis, G., et al. (2003). Immersive VR decision training: telling interactive stories featuring advanced virtual human simulation technologies. Proceedings of the Workshop on Virtual Environments 2003

(pp. 97-106). Zurich, Switzerland: ACM Press.

Randall, J., & Jones, R. T. (1993). Teaching Children Fire Safety Skills. Fire Technology, 29

(3), 268-280.

Roussou, M. (2004). Learning by Doing and Learning Through Play: An Exploration of Interactivity in Virtual Environments. ACM Computers in Entertainment, 2 (1), 1-23. Roussou, M., & Slater, M. (2005). A Virtual Playground for the Study of the Role of Interactivity in Virtual Learning Environments. PRESENCE 2005: The 8th Annual International Workshop on Presence (pp. 245-253). London: International Society for Presence Research.

Roussou, M., Johnson, A. E., Moher, T. G., Leigh, J., Vasilakis, C. A., & Barnes, C. R. (1999). Learning and Building Together in an Immersive Virtual World. Presence , 247-263. Roussou, M., Oliver, M., & Slater, M. (2006, October). The virtual playground: an

educational virtual reality environment for evaluating interactivity and conceptual learning.

Virtual Reality , 227-240.

Seymour, N. E. (2005). Virtual reality in general surgical training. European Surgery, 37

(5), 298-303.

Sherman, W. R., Penick, M. A., Su, S., Brown, T., & Harris, F. C. (2007). VRFire: an Immersive Visualization Experience for Wildfire Spread Analysis. IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (pp. 243-246). Charlotte, NC: IEEE.

Slator, B. M., Chaput, H., Cosmano, R., Dischinger, B., Imdieke, C., & Vender, B. (2005). A multi-user desktop virtual environment for teaching shop-keeping to children. Virtual Reality

, 49-56.

St. Julien, T. U., & Shaw, C. D. (2003). Firefighter command training in virtual environment.

Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Diversity in Computing (pp. 30-33). Atlanta, GA: ACM Press.

Stansfield, S., Shawver, D., Rogers, D., & Hightower, R. (2005). Mission Visualization for Planning and Training. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications , 12-14.

Stansfield, S., Shawver, D., Sobel, A., Prasad, M., & Tapia, L. (2000). Design and

Implementation of a Virtual Reality System and Its Application to Training Medical First Responders. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 9 (6), 524-556.

Sulbaran, T., & Baker, N. C. (2000). Enhancing Engineering Education Through Distributed Virtual Reality. ASEE/IEEE frontiers in Education Conference, (pp. 13-18). Kansas City, MO.

Tam, E. K., Badra, F., Marceau, R. J., Marin, M., & Malowany, A. (1999). A Web-based virtual environment for operator training. IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 14 (3), 802- 808.

Tate, D. L., Silbert, L., & King, T. (1997). Virtual Environments for Shipboard Firefighting Training. Proceedings of the IEEE 1997 Virtual Reality International Annual Symposium

(pp. 61-68). Albuquerque, NM: IEEE Computer Society Press.

Thomson, J., Tolmie, A., Foot, H., Whelan, K., Sarvary, P., & Morrison, S. (2005). Influence of virtual reality training on the roadside crossing judgments of child pedestrians. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 11 (3), 175-184.

United States Fire Administration. (2002). Protecting Your Family From Fire. Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Vanacken, L., Grossman, T., & Coninix, K. (2007). Exploring the Effects of Environment Density and Target Visability on Object Selection in 3D virtual environments. IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (pp. 115-122). Charlotte, NC: IEEE.

Verenikina, I., Harris, P., & Lysaght, P. (2003). Child's play: computer games, theories of play and children's development. In J. Wright, A. McDougall, J. Murnane, & J. Lowe (Ed.),

Proceedings of the international Federation For information Processing Working Group 3.5 Open Conference on Young Children and Learning Technologies (pp. 99-106). Sydney: Australian Computer Society.

Warda L, Tenenbein M, Moffatt MEK. House fire injury prevention update. Part I. A review of risk factors for fatal and non-fatal house fire injury. Injury Prevention 1999; 5 :145-50. Wittenberg, G. (1995). Training with Virtual Reality. Assembly Automation , 12-14. Zayas, B. (2001). Learning from 3D VR representations: learner-centred design, realism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to those who helped me with various aspects of conducting research and the writing of this thesis. First and foremost, I need to thank my family for their support throughout my education. I would also like to thank Dr. Shana Smith for her guidance, patience and support throughout this research and the writing of this thesis. In addition I thank my committee members for their efforts and contributions to this work: Dr. Ann Thompson who helped me to design my experimental instruments; and Steven Herrnstadt whose knowledge about game development was invaluable. Finally I would like to thank my friends who have helped an supported me: Kristin Dale, Abhishek Seth, Kim Weaver, and Yuzhu Lu.