Figure: A child interacting with NICE in the CAVE(tm).
An obvious step in the exploration and testing of the educational ideas, systems, and evaluation approaches mentioned in the previous chapter was to develop a working system that is informed by these issues. This lead to the development of the Narrative Immersive Constructionist / Collaborative Environments project, or NICE.
The NICE project started in 1995 as a collaboration between students from the Interactive Computing Environments laboratory and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Inspired by work conducted at both laboratories, especially by the Graphic StoryWriter \cite {Steiner92,Steiner95,Steiner94,Steiner94a}, NICE set out to explore the possibilities of creating a virtual learning environment based on storytelling and narrative. As the group was comprised of members with diverse interests, this original idea was extended to include and combine many other thematic areas into a family of educational environments.
As currently implemented, NICE is an experiential learning environment in which children explore, cultivate, and tend a healthy virtual garden. In order to achieve this, they select seeds, plant vegetables, pull weeds, and control symbolic representations of environmental factors, such as a raincloud to provide rain, a sun to give sunlight, or a compost heap to recycle weeds. To facilitate their understanding of the underlying principles of this micro-ecosystem, they can change their size or observe the plants' roots. The garden is part of a larger island that includes a volcano, a bridge, the beach, and an underground maze. In addition to their activities in the garden, multiple children can collaborate synchronously within the virtual environment, through avatar representations and audio, or asynchronously by observing the visual narrative generated by the system as a WWW page \cite {Roussos96,Roussos97,Roussos97b}.
Figure: A child interacting with NICE in the CAVE(tm).