APPLICATION OF VR BASED APPROACH TO HELP SECONDARY STUDENTS IN PERFORMING PRACTICAL ACTIVTIES

Abstract

The emergence of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education has enabled the development of new tools and platforms that serve to create better learning content. The education sector is expected to have significant change by using these technologies. The goal of using these technologies in the education sector is to make learning easier, faster, and more engaging for the students. In some specific domains, students need to work on the practical activities using specific equipment to clarify and understand their concepts. To sustain engagement and provide learning proficiency to the learner, there is a need to provide them real-time exposure to labs, so that they can perform scientific experiments. However, in developing countries like Pakistan where there is an increasing number of learners, it is difficult to give each learner appropriate tools to perform such activities. To address this issue, an experimental research study will be conducted in physics subject on 9th-grade students to measure the learning and engagement of students in a school named Govt. Girls High School Sameejabad No. 1 in Multan, Pakistan. A total of 53 students will take part in the research. The purpose of this research is to make learning interactive and engaging for the students and to provide an immersive virtual environment to users by using 3D interactions and simulating these experiments on the high school level. The research is divided into three phases. In the pre intervention phase, a pre-test will be conducted to assess students’ knowledge regarding Physics. During the intervention phase, students will be given a Virtual Reality (VR) application in compliance with VR headsets, so that students can have the experience of VR physics experiments. Students will be observed on Student Engagement Walkthrough checklist1. In the post-intervention phase, the post-test will be conducted based on the learning outcomes of learners. In the end, data gathered through observation, pre-test, and post-test will help to analyse the student’s engagement and learning behaviour. This research will help us to take an insight into using the Virtual Reality application approach in the classroom on students learning and engagement. Furthermore, this study will add up significantly to the existing wealth of literature and help educators to further explore the methods of making education engaging and available to all learners.