Using Immersive Technologies to Teach Advanced STEM Concepts in Engineering Education

This project involves the development of 3D visualizations of abstract concepts in Electromagnetism, Vector Calculus, and Coordinate Transformations, using Virtual Reality (VR) technology in an immersive, exploratory, and engaging environment. Virtual Reality provides the means of exploration, to construct visuals and manipulable objects to represent knowledge, which in turns leads to a constructivist way of learning, in the sense that students are allowed to build their own knowledge from meaningful experiences. In addition, using VR as a teaching tool has the potential of addressing many challenges traditional teaching usually faces, and can lead to increased student engagement while removing some of the anxiety student experience while in active learning environments.

The VR experiences are generated by students at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which reflects the strong educational impact of this project, as it allows students to contribute to the educational experiences of their peers. Student competencies around conceptual understanding of electromagnetism topics, as well as their understanding of mathematical concepts, are measured via formative and summative assessments. To evaluate the effectiveness of VR learning, each VR experience encompasses build-in evaluation tools, such as short conceptual questions, designed to primarily measure conceptual understanding of the various topics. These quizzes are part of the VR experiences, as students are allowed to access and engage in the experiment as needed in order to appropriately answer the posed questions. The assessment is set in a playful setting that acts as a training game, which not only provides the context for discovery, but also reinforces the learning experience.

This paper discusses the implementation and the pedagogy of the Virtual Reality experiences, with examples for specific ones, as well as challenges, and student feedback with the new approach. We discuss the implementation of concepts pertaining to the laws of electromagnetism and elements vector calculus, designed to enhance student understanding of the nature of operators such the gradient, curl and divergence, as well as the development of VR experiences to visualize concepts pertaining to spatial geometry and coordinate transformations.