Educational benefits: testing and evaluation of a collaborative 3D world

Innovative technologies offer extraordinary opportunities to "traditional" education, but they also open new challenges to educators: what features should be implemented in order to obtain which results? How can results be tested? Evaluating the educational benefits of complex environments, such as 3D worlds where cooperative interactions take place (i.e. many users logged in at the same time perform educational/entertaining activities together), requires a complex set of evaluation methods, to test the wide range of educational benefits they are meant to achieve. This paper presents an evaluation of a complex and multifaceted educational project: SEE, Shrine Educational Experience. After briefly describing SEE main features, the paper presents the evaluation methods used to test its educational effectiveness and corresponding outcomes. All data are based on the results of a massive field test evaluation, involving over 1400 students and teachers from different countries between 2002 and 2004.