Work in Progress: Developing Engineering Students' Professional Development Skills through Augmented and Virtual Reality Gaming Environments

摘要

Students working on hands on projects have a unique opportunity to exercise and learn engineering skills outside of what they learn in the classroom. However, students also need professional skills, or soft skills, that allow them to work effectively on their projects in a team environment. Unfortunately, these skills are often overlooked in the students' core classes and students are usually unfamiliar with these skills. Not having these skills in a project based program can lead to negative outcomes for the students. New technology is rapidly changing, and new techniques that can be used to teach engineering students these valuable skills have become easier to obtain. Advancements in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are one set of emerging technology being explored in education and engineering education. In this paper, we will examine the use of VR to teach engineering students professional development skills such as leadership, teamwork, and communication. This study will be used to examine if these tools can aid the students in learning these valuable skills. The Game Based Learning (GBL) theoretical framework will be used to guide this research. With GBL, we will use a gaming environment to teach these skills to students in an interactive environment and study on the effectiveness of using both VR and GBL to teach these skills. We will also discuss the activities that were developed and the learning outcomes from each activity. Finally, we will discuss preliminary results from students using the virtual reality system and the activities we have developed.