Advancing Multi-User Virtual Reality Classrooms to Support Collaborative Experiential Learning and Teaching of Introductory Physics

Physics, which comprises a combination of theoretical concepts and practical experiments, could be a challenging STEM subject to learn, especially for non-science majors. This project investigates a multi-user virtual reality classroom framework to promote collaborative experiential learning and teaching of introductory physics. Through this framework, teachers can easily author and conduct physics classes in virtual reality, while students engage in collaborative experiential learning, leading to a deeper conceptual understanding of physics and more sophisticated experiment skills. This project offers a novel, interdisciplinary research perspective by bringing together concepts and techniques from virtual reality, human-computer interaction, multimedia, networking, astronomy, physics, learning technologies, and science learning. The team will publicly disseminate the research findings, system designs, and software toolkits. They will collaborate with the George Mason University’s teacher preparation programs and the observatory to adopt virtual reality for physics education. They will also mentor undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to participate in virtual reality research, as well as organize outreach activities to showcase multi-user virtual reality physics classes to students, educators, and the general public. This project focuses on four research aims. First, the project team will investigate system-level techniques such as efficient remote rendering and viewport adaptive streaming to enable scalable multi-user virtual reality physics classes. Second, the project team will create interactive annotation, communication, and visualization tools to support collaborative experiential learning and teaching of physics in virtual reality. Third, the team will develop handy authoring tools for content creators and teachers to quickly generate virtual reality physics classes adaptive to students’ learning progress. Fourth, the team will conduct user studies to examine the impact of the proposed virtual reality classroom framework on students’ enjoyment, engagement, teamwork, confidence, and knowledge retention compared to traditional teaching approaches. This project is funded by the Research on Innovative Technologies for Enhanced Learning (RITEL) program that supports early-stage exploratory research in emerging technologies for teaching and learning. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.