Virtual Reality: Faculty Use Cases
Physics
Professor Patrick Johnson (Physics) wanted to help his students visualize electric fields and how objects behave as they rotate about particular axes. He hypothesized that a virtual reality world could help visualize electric fields and rotating objects in ways that are much more difficult in our real world. Electric fields are everywhere, but they are invisible. To assess this, he offered a pre-test and a post-test immediately before and after the student’s experience with the VR tools.
The tests consisted of 5 content-rich questions, 3 associated with rotations and 2 associated with visualizing electric fields. The post-test also included a free-response question for students to express any thoughts they had in an open-ended way. Johnson assessed the success of this project based on the average number of correct answers the students scored on the pre-test versus the post-test.
The VR tools were “even more effective than [he] possibly could have imagined.” Students scored an average of 0.6 correct answers of a possible 5 on the pre-test (~12%) from a sample size of 35 students. On the post-test, students scored an average of 3.6 correct answers of a possible 5 (~72%) from a sample size of 31 students.
In my introductory physics classes, we often discuss concepts which can be very abstract and hard to visualize. One of these topics is the concept of an electromagnetic field. These fields exist everywhere around us at all times, but our standard five senses don't give us an intuition for what an electric field or magnetic field is or looks like in the way that we have an intuition for what the path of a ball will be when it's thrown. VR gives me an opportunity for students to explore these concepts because we can make things that are invisible to us in the material world visible in the virtual world. I created a tool that would allow users to place positive and negative charges around a virtual space. When they placed the charges, the electric field would update to surround the users with arrows pointing in the direction of the electric field.
The virtual space is modeled after our physics laboratory room and was designed by former physics major, Kate Bonner ('20). Electric and magnetic fields tend to be the hardest material we cover in our introductory physics sequence, and it is a topic mostly met with frustration and confusion when first introduced. When students got to experience the idea of an electric field via VR, their response was much, much more positive, and their groans of frustration turned to "oohs," and "aahs," of excitement with some laughter as well. And it wasn't just spectacle—students improved significantly between a small pre-test before they explored the virtual space and post-test after they had played around in VR.
Art and Art History
Barrett Tilney (Art and Art History) worked with the Library’s Barrinton Baynes to design a Virtual Reality museum visit for his art students.
“Instead of going to a brick and mortar museum, which would be difficult as the class is online, the students visit the museum virtually. I took 360 degree photos of the relevant galleries at the National Gallery of Art and uploaded them onto Kuula. Students could then ‘stroll’ through the galleries and click on paintings on the walls. Hyperlinks then give more information about the works of art. They would then answer questions about the artworks just as they would have done should they have been at the physical museum. It is not the same as visiting the physical works of art, but it is much more engaging than just going to a museum website and searching for individual paintings. Additionally, the students could all experience the same museum, rather than sending them out to any museum in their vicinity. The students' evaluations of the class often stress how much they enjoyed the ‘visits.’”
Learning, Design, and Technology
Professor Bryan Alexander worked with Barrinton Baynes in the Library to explore Virtual Reality’s (VR) possibilities for higher education in his Ed Tech seminar. Students read scholarly and journalistic accounts of VR because Bryan wanted "them to get some hands-on practice. Barrinton and William Choi, our tech liaison, did a great job of providing the gear and getting students using it. Individually and together we explored VR experiences, comparing notes about design, affordances, pedagogy, and fun." They then applied their readings to digital reality.
