This report provides some background and results of an educative technology project that was developed at the School of Engineering of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

1. Whitepaper 2012
How 3D environments can change
the engagement of university students

2. How 3D environments can change the engagement of university students
T
his report provides some background and results of an educative technol-
ogy project that was developed at the School of Engineering of the Na-
tional Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
The development is called “Virtual Laboratory
for Analytic Geometry”, and it is designed to It is an excellent way for students to retain
work as a laboratory in a way that resembles what they learned on the lectures, there are times
conventional physics or chemistry labs. where you forget parts and this helps us to keep
learning. It is a great aid to be able to understand the
The solution was implemented with a combi- underlying concepts behind formulas and theoretical
models, as we can see them right away in 3D and
nation of very accessible technologies: Moodle,
that opens our mind. It is a nice learning tool, Con-
which is an open source LMS platform which finds gratulations! I hope you keep doing this every semes-
widespread use in schools and universities around ter, helping students in their learning.
the globe, and Unity, literally a game changer in
democratizing videogame production. - Engineering Student at UNAM

3. How 3D environments can change the engagement of university students
M
etagraphos, an innovation agent in the The second element, the virtual exercise, is pro-
educative sector, was awarded with a duced in Unity and is closely integrated with web
contract to develop all contents ba- forms that allow students to input their answers
sed on the specifications of the Mathematics to some of the challenges to them. Each exercise
Department, conformed by a college of 30 pro- shows 3D models in accordance to the themes
fessors. that professors will cover during the one semes-
ter lecture Analytic Geometry.
The overall structure based in Moodle allows stu-
dents to visit 5 different practices, each composed Past experiences allowed UNAM to gather infor-
of a previous questionnaire, a virtual exercise and mation about those key aspects that are impor-
a test. The first and third elements are implemen- tant for the learning process. A previous version
ted with conventional html tools, and an algebraic was based on persistent multiuser virtual worlds
expression render module. (Second Life and Open Sim).

4. How 3D environments can change the engagement of university students
I like this version better than when we nee-
ded to use Second Life!
- Engineering Student at UNAM
W
hile having other students present in
the platform proved to be attractive
to students, no evidence of an im-
provement on the learning outcome was found. it
was decided that a better implementation would
be to have all in a single user 3D models, em-
bedded into the LMS.
Additional elements, like activity tracking asso-
ciated with an automated grading, facilitate the
tasks of professors in evaluating their students,
and establish different ways to use the laboratory
depending on their individual needs. Some pro-
fessors used the laboratory without grades, just
as a hands-on reinforcement for the theoretical
part. Others decided to incorporate it as exam-
ples during their class sessions.The majority chose
to include the laboratory as a 10% to 20% of the
final grade.

5. How 3D environments can change the engagement of university students
C
ommunication between AJAX formularies and 3D models is made through function calls im-
plemented in C# / Javascript within the Unity runtime environment. Events occurring in the
3D model can be tracked therefore into the Moodle database, and entries in the database or
from the web page can affect the way 3D models behave. This close integration can assist instructional
designers in making automated 3D learning contents that are not only compelling but seamless with
other systems used for performance tracking.
The infrastructure behind the platform was a cloud server configured in Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (AWS-EC2) on a Standard Medium Size Instance running the LAMP stack for Moodle. A total
of 1,500 students were enrolled in the Virtual Laboratory, and the operation was in terms of techni-
cal requirements uneventful, with an almost 100% uptime.
Production of contents (script development and 3D modeling) was synchronized with the timeline
of each practice, and took around a week of a 3 person development team for each of the practices.
Practices were launched into the live environment once a testing by the professors was made. Final
adjustments (text and some contents) took place 3 days before launching.
Further stages comprise a continuing operation of the Virtual Laboratory for coming semesters, at
a discounted cost needed to system maintenance, small upgrades and technical support for both
students and professors.
For further enquiries please
contact:
Ernesto Riestra M.
Chief Technology Officer
eriestra@metagraphos.com
Skype: skype-ceam
www.metagraphos.com
fb: /metagraphos.social
tw: @Metagtraphos