Investigating Engagement and Flow with a Placed-Based Immersive Virtual Reality Game
- PDF / 1,603,817 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 116 Downloads / 188 Views
Investigating Engagement and Flow with a Placed‑Based Immersive Virtual Reality Game Alec Bodzin1 · Robson Araujo Junior2 · Thomas Hammond3 · David Anastasio4 Accepted: 23 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract An immersive virtual reality (iVR) game for high school students to learn about locations in their watershed with a primary focus on their city was designed and developed, employing a design model that focuses on flow. An exploratory study with the iVR game was conducted in an urban school in the eastern USA with 57 adolescents ages 16–18 from a population that is economically disadvantaged and includes students who are typically unengaged in traditional school-based learning environments. After game completion, the participants completed a 10-item survey measuring elements of flow and a 12-item survey designed to measure perceptions toward learning with VR games, immersion and presence. Participant focus groups were conducted with an emphasis on features that promoted engagement, learning, immersion, and presence. The findings revealed that all students experienced a flow state when they played the iVR learning game. Almost all users (98.1%) had positive attitudes towards using the iVR game. Students experienced high immersion and presence. In addition, students had favorable attitudes towards learning with iVR games in school environments. Keywords Virtual reality · Learning game · Engagement · Flow · Place-based
Introduction
* Alec Bodzin [email protected] Robson Araujo Junior [email protected] Thomas Hammond [email protected] David Anastasio [email protected] 1
Department of Education and Human Services, Lehigh, University, A113 Iacocca Hall, 111 Research Dr, Bethlehem 18015, USA
2
Department of Education and Human Services, Lehigh University, A109 Iacocca Hall, 111 Research Dr, Bethlehem 18015, USA
3
Department of Education and Human Services, Lehigh University, A223 Iacocca Hall, 111 Research Dr, Bethlehem 18015, USA
4
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lehigh University, A223 Iacocca Hall, 111 Research Dr, Bethlehem 18015, USA
Learner engagement is critical to STEM education. This is especially true for high school students who are typically underrepresented in STEM-related fields. In the USA, traditionally underrepresented individuals in STEMrelated fields include individuals from non-dominant racial, ethnic, and economic cultural backgrounds such as lowincome, Black, Latino, and English-learning populations (Burke 2007; National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics 2019). In US high schools, many students from these populations are unengaged learners who are not concerned with achievement in school, avoid challenging work, and often do not complete learning tasks (Sanacore 2008). The level of engagement with adolescents in urban school settings can vary with traditional teaching and learning experiences that include didactic, lab, and field experiences. Classroom learning environments have many distractions that i
Data Loading...
