Experiences in using a MUVE for enhancing motivation in engineering education

NUCLEO is an ongoing research project that aims at developing a MUVE (Multi-User Virtual Environment) platform for collaborative learning, which uses a role game and a virtual fantasy world to stage a problem-based collaborative learning strategy. The project has four main objectives: (1) to stimulate a change of attitude among students towards studying, forcing them to change their passive listener role to a more active role; (2) to increase students' motivation by adjusting the visual features and the interface of the environment to the peculiarities in the way members of the net generation interact with contents and process them; (3) to help to develop communication skills, teamwork abilities and soft skills in our students, while at the same time they acquire the knowledge and technical abilities included in the subject curriculum; (4) to integrate the platform into an e-learning management system application as a way of centralizing the data management, while at the same time offering the chance to combine it with the use of other instructional strategies that can be applied to wider contexts. This paper introduces the reference framework under which the NUCLEO system has been developed, along with the specific model designed to fulfil the objectives mentioned above.