The round earth project-collaborative VR for elementary school kids

This paper discusses the deployment of a collaborative VR environment in an elementary school to help teach children that the Earth is spherical. The concept of a spherical Earth and the implications of that fact are well-represented in the AAAS Project 2061 Science for all Americans report and the difficulty of teaching it has been documented by Nussbaum, Vosniadou and Brewer [3,4]. The concept of a round Earth is not a simple one for children to acquire. Their everyday experience reinforces their deeply held notion that the Earth is flat. More precisely, their mental model of the world separates `sky ' and `earth' into two parallel layers, one `above ' the other; the two directions `up ' and `down ' are absolute. Telling young children that the Earth is round does not cause their intuitive model to be replaced by a spherical conception of the Earth. Instead children assimilate the new information into their prior knowledge and often conclude that the earth is flat and circular. The spherical Earth is a simple example of a deep idea ó a fundamental concept that lies underneath our extensive system of domain knowledge and influences how experience and discourse are conceptualized. Revising these deep ideas, these core concepts, is difficult because new knowledge is assimilated in terms of existing knowledge. When the new knowledg