Work in Progress: Exploring the Method to Design an Equal Engineering Class Environment for Students' Collaborative Learning under Head-mounted Display Virtual Reality (HMD VR) Condition

摘要

HMD VR has gained increased attention in last two years. Especially in the engineering education field, it enables users to be fully immersed in a 3D simulated engineering workplace overcoming the time and place limitation. This characteristic is welcomed by engineering faculties, who have used various HMD VR applications to facilitate their class instruction. However, inequitable phenomenon may exist when students participate in learning activities under HMD VR environment. A typical case is reported by Kolomaznik, Sullivan, and Vyvyan. In a first-year science communication class, students were self-organized into small groups of four to six people to play a maze game. The role settings in the game were that one student in a group played the game with HMD headset while others directed the player with a map outside the VR environment. The post-test survey results show that one in five students frequently observed dominating behaviors from their team members in this activity. Intuitively, this activity design is problematical. Since only one HMD headset was available in a group, it would be hard to avoid unequally accessing this learning resource among students. However, we are not sure whether this intuition is right; if it is right, to which extend this design will cause inequity; whether this inequity will affect students' performance and learning outcomes; what are the design principles when we prepare similar activities with equity and maximizing the potential of HMD VR in engineering education.