A new USTAR funded team, Interactive Design for Instructional Applications and Simulations (IDIAS) Institute, will further develop simulations and GPS-based platforms that focus on learning and instruction.

The team received $2.35 million in funds over six years from the Utah Science, Technology and Research (USTAR) initiative, said Brett Shelton, IDIAS team lead and assistant professor for the instructive technology and learning science department of the College of Education. The team is also led by Carolyn Cardenas, department head of the art department; and Alan Hashimoto, associate professor of graphic arts.

Shelton said they will use much of the funding for student employment – both graduate and undergraduate students – to help develop intellectual propriety within the realm of instructional media and technologies.

“The students will be involved with the design and development of the technology applications themselves,” Shelton said.

IDIAS is working on two projects at this time. One of the projects is a multiplayer, virtual 3D environment, to support training, Shelton said. It is uniquely specialized as a learning tool.

“It’s a game engine that holds unique instructional features that other game engines don’t support,” Shelton said. “It has a specific nature set of tools to support learning rather than just strictly entertainment.”

The goal for the project is to improve the Hazardous Emergency Accident Training (HEAT) engine previously created by Shelton and Hashimoto, who first began working together about five years ago.

Shelton said the HEAT engine, which is comparable to those found in today’s video game and military training simulators, can be used to build various applications for training and certification purposes. While the technology is as advanced as the latest commercial engines available, HEAT was developed at a lower cost, making it a cheaper, yet advanced, alternative.

The other project for the team is GeoBOB, a handheld GPS-based platform that will allow for the creation of GPS-oriented applications for smart phones and GPS-capable devices, Shelton said.

Hashimoto said the idea behind GeoBOB is to build a platform on which applications for smart phones, PDAs and GPS devices will be built. The applications will use GPS coordinates to trigger events – media-oriented text messages, images, audio, video recordings – on smart phones and GPS devices as they near the specific geographical points.

The applications can have both an educational use – as in walking historical tours – and a commercial use to advertise for business, Hashimoto said.

Shelton said a similar hand-held unit was built by Hashimoto and himself for the American West Heritage Center, based on a Garmin GPS device. The device had a game-type application that allow people to participate on a game – one can take the persona of a person living about 150 years ago – as they walk through the various displays in the center. The device was created by students in his game development class. While there are no samples of GeoBOB now, Shelton said it will be a more robust platform used for the development of similar applications.

Hashimoto said what both the projects have in common is that they are working with existing technology in which both he and Shelton have worked together on for several years.

“(The team) provides this cross-disciplinary effort between colleges and departments,” Hashimoto said. “As far as I know, this is the first project that actually includes team members and key personnel not only from across departments, but across colleges.”

He refers to the partnership between the graphic arts department, and the instructional technology and learning sciences department. Hashimoto said while this is rare at the university level, it is common in private industries. It will give students involved the chance to see what each discipline has to offer when they work together.

“It is all cutting-edge stuff,” Hashimoto said. “It is stuff that is all up and coming and hasn’t been fully realized now. It deals with media, and I think students are really plugged in with media now.”

Michael O’Malley, who does the public relations and marketing for USTAR and a member of its governing board, said the goal of USTAR is to help the teams at USU and at the other research campuses to generate research that will lead them to create patents and licenses for new technologies.

Hashimoto said while he cannot give any specific names, the team is forming partnerships with groups and communities who are interested in the type of research the team is working on at USU.

O’Malley said the IDIAS team is one of three new teams that were created at USU and received funds by USTAR over the summer. All three teams have been given a combined budget of $9 million. The budget will be used to hire new faculty and personnel that will allow the team to keep working on its current research, and will allow it to generate both new research and further funding in the form of grants from the federal government and other institutions.

Jacoba Mendelkow, public relations and marketing specialist for USU’s department of Strategic Ventures and Economic Development (SVED), said undergraduate research is strong at USU, and the new team will provide “really cool” opportunities for students to get involved with the research. SVED is the department that oversees the nine USTAR teams at USU.

Shelton said IDIAS plans to hire several consultants who live and work in Cache Valley to help guide the projects. Many of them are USU graduates from the instructional technology and learning sciences and the graphic arts department, who have the unique type of experience needed for his team.

Mendelkow said including the new teams created over the summer, SVED at USU manages a total of nine teams, which have received USTAR funding as seeding money. That is, the teams plan to use the money to get the research started, and hire researchers, consultants and other personnel. After the research gets going, the plan is to obtain money from federal grants.

Shelton has already submitted a proposal for a grant from the National Endowment for Humanity and is waiting to hear from them. He says they are eager to obtain grant money wherever possible to further the projects.

“(IDIAS) is about taking your traditional learning ideas and adding more media to it and the idea of interactivity,” Hashimoto said. “It is like going a step further. It’s not just about writing, and listening and watching, but it’s a combination of all of those, plus interaction, and I think this is what the strength of (IDIAS) is.”

–jp.rodriguez@aggiemail.usu.edu