The development of river city, a multi-user virtual environment-based scientific inquiry curriculum: Historical and design evolutions

This chapter details the 8-year development of River City from the initial design through its current large-scale version. Throughout the project's history, we employed a design-based research (DBR) approach to the iterative, formative development of the MUVE-based inquiry curriculum, with a current focus on resolving scalability issues inherent in large-scale implementations. In this chapter, we reflect on the evolution of our design-based methodology and discuss what we have learned about designing for inquiry using DBR through several cycles of implementations. We also present an overview of the affective and learning outcomes of the nearly 15,000 students and 100 teachers that have learned from River City. By reflecting explicitly on the evolution of our design strategy, we hope to provide a guide to others interested in design-based research for the use of MUVEs to facilitate scientific inquiry in the K-12 classroom.