Teaching Students Professional Development Skills using Virtual and Augmented Reality
PhD Dissertation Research
My PhD dissertation is focused on Engineering Education and is under the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) program at Iowa State University. Unlike my BS and MS degrees, I did not focus on a more traditional engineering topic or continue research based on my MS. Instead, I decided to use my background in electrical and computer engineering and have it apply to what I was currently doing…teaching. I wanted to understand better how we can teach students more effectively and especially how we can use newer technology like virtual and augmented reality to teach.
Topic Discussion
Research Questions
This research looked into answering the following questions:
Can we use games with VR and AR to teach professional development skills to students?
Is using games with VR and AR more than, less than or about the same to using more traditional methods?
Methodology
The methodology approach to this research is to conduct the study with two groups of students. One group will be taught professional development skills using games with VR and AR elements in them. The second group will learn professional development skills using more traditional methods such as reading materials, watching videos, and interaction with the instructor.
Information collected will consist of both qualitative and quantitative data. Quantitative data will include metrics such as scores on quizzes, numerical data from surveys and how long students take to complete a challenge in the game. Qualitative data will be gathered from open ended questions from surveys, interviews and observations of the students during the games.
Results
This research is currently ongoing. Results will be placed here once completed.
Video Game Development
Research was done with using both commercial off the shelf games and also with developing my own game to be used for research. The advantage with developing your own of course is that you have complete control over. The disadvantage of course is the time and resources needed to develop your own game. Tools like Unity do help and Unity was used to develop the demo shown in the video here. This was also a proof of concept of mixing both hardware and software. A Circuit Playground Express was used to communicate with the game. The concept was to create a two player system where one player was in VR but needed help from the player that was in the real world. Since the device communicated back and forth, feedback was possible in both directions.