Metro students will soon have the chance to boldly go where no student has gone before.

Metro State, in cooperation with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS), has just received a $470,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to test the Immersive Virtual Environment at the Gates Planetarium in teaching astronomy to non-majors.

The grant, written through the Office of Sponsored Program’s Grant Mentoring Program (GMP), matched Kamran Sahami, an assistant professor of physics, with Physics Professor and mentor Richard Krantz. The grant will enable Sahami to study the effectiveness of the 3-D, virtual environments in how students learn about the final frontier.

“When you normally go to the planetarium,” Sahami explains, “there’s the star ball and things rotate and you have this limited view. The new generation of planetaria has multiple projectors hooked up to a computer and creates a model of the solar system. You can go to any location in this model.”

Using software developed at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science called Cosmic Atlas, visitors to the digital Gates Planetarium can virtually “travel” through space, leaving Earth to gain a perspective on space not possible at a traditional venue. Sahami postulates that this ability to look up at the stars, then “lift off” the Earth’s surface will help students change misconceptions they have about space, such as the workings of a lunar eclipse, and even the phases of the moon.

This year, Sahami will use sections of beginning astronomy to identify where students have gaps in their knowledge about space and then develop visual strategies to fill in those holes. When the experiment begins in earnest next fall, three groups of astronomy classes will be exposed to the new curriculum using three different kinds of pedagogies: the immersive virtual environment at Gates, the same material presented on a flat screen in the classroom and traditional multimedia techniques. Students will be tested through all phases of the project to see how fast they are grasping topics and whether they are retaining the material. Sahami also hopes that the technology will prove beneficial to female students, who tend to learn more effectively in non-linear ways.

“There is evidence from other virtual reality simulations,” Sahami observes, “that the differential level of learning (in these immersive environments) is greater for females than for males.”

Should the immersive technology at Gates prove effective, Sahami believes the “Astronomy Learning in Immersive Virtual Environments” (ALIVE) project will be a gateway to a new-generation classroom, one where the technology can be translated to other science courses or virtual simulations of historic battles and events. “This is the next level of education,” he says. “We’ve gone from having textbooks with illustrations and photographs to incorporating video and motion into the classroom. By being in the immersive environment, the experience is like you are actually there. Your mind processes things differently than when you see something on the screen. To quantify the gain is what this project is all about.”