Virtual worlds and their role in investigating change in cognitive models of motion

Research into children´s ideas about physical phenomena has shown that these ideas are very different from those of the scientist. There is a large body of research data, mainly descriptive accounts of children´s reasoning, which is not always easy to interpret. There is also a difference of opinion about how these conceptions should be viewed: it is not clear whether children´s ideas in dynamics should be described as systematic mental structures or as ad hoc temporary constructions. It is the authors´ belief that commonsense ideas about motion can be represented as causal models which are different from the Newtonian view of motion. Student´s failure to answer dynamics problems correctly reveals a lack in their knowledge of the causal principles that underly the formulas they have been taught. They believe that experiences that enable students to acquire accurate causal models will make them less likely to develop misconceptions, and better able to understand the principles underlying Newtonian mechanics. They hypothesise that a sequence of pre-designed activities carried out in a virtual environment with a head-tracking head-mounted display and a dataglove will lead students to build up an accurate qualitative model of the laws of motion more effectively than conventional computer simulations or instruction using physical apparatus such as found in schools. They propose to build a collection of virtual worlds designed to aid particular stages of acquiring accurate causal models of motion