3. Establishing design requirements
Designing a narrative-centered learning environment for STEM education is a complex enterprise. To devise a system that
creates learning experiences that are both effective and engaging, the project team addressed three sets of design requirements:
curricular and narrative interaction. For several years prior to the inception of the project, our team had been involved
in the design and development of a narrative-centered learning environment for middle school science, CRYSTAL
ISLAND: OUTBREAK, which was designed with a curricular focus of microbiology [57]. Building on the experience of the middle
school CRYSTAL ISLAND project, the team mapped out the curricular and narrative interaction requirements for the CRYSTAL ISLAND:
UNCHARTED DISCOVERY environment. Each of these is discussed in turn.
3.1. Curricular focus
A critical set of design requirements to address is the curriculum. Because of the affordances of virtual environments for
spatial cognition, it was determined that of the science units of the upper elementary science curriculum, the CRYSTAL ISLAND:
UNCHARTED DISCOVERY environment would support the Landforms unit. It was designed to support globally relevant skills for
science literacy and also address a key component of the Landforms unit, ‘‘Maps and Models,’’ which is required by upper
elementary science curricula at both the state and national levels in the United States.
Despite the real-world utility of map interpretation [2], becoming a skilled map user is cognitively challenging. It is difficult
for students to connect what they see in the world to map elements. Understanding space-to-map and map-to-space
relations is an important but complex skill to acquire, as is the ability to utilize map elements (including scale, directions,
and symbols) and to master projective and metric concepts. To address these challenges, it was determined that the CRYSTAL
ISLAND: UNCHARTED DISCOVERY environment would be designed to teach map skills through a broad range of guided map interpretation
and navigation experiences through unfamiliar, complex terrains in the learning environment’s virtual uncharted
island. It targets four learning objectives: