Virtual gallery walk, an innovative outlet for sharing student research work in K-12 classrooms

This paper discusses a case study which aims to make research projects more engaging for middle school students by incorporating a variation to the traditional gallery walk workflow. The process begins by having the students conduct individual research on one of a finite list of topics and produce a poster that details what they have learned. We collect the research posters and transfer the media into the shared virtual world of second life, where a developer organizes the posters into a ldquovirtual museumrdquo of full-color high-quality panels displaying the studentspsila creations. Students return to the computer lab, log in to the virtual world, and explore the virtual gallery. This gives students the opportunity to learn more about the other topics from their peers in an engaging, interactive, and fun way. We evaluate the effectiveness of this workflow by injecting quizzes on the topic material before the research phase, after the research phase, and after using the virtual gallery walk. As virtual worlds are rarely utilized in K-12 classrooms, the virtual gallery walk is innovative as a vehicle for student learning and as a possible outlet for sharing the work with community of other students active within second life.