GardenVR - Immersive learning of horticulture

Inside a classroom, Virtual Reality (VR) work situations may serve for vocational education due to spatially including their viewer fully. However, no study has so far investigated the perspective of vocational teachers on the educational utility of viewer-including VR work situations. This is particularly relevant for work situations involving environmental planning due to the expectation that VR facilitates such a task. Therefore, we have enabled horticultural teachers to plan a basic garden in a VR work situation. We asked them to assess the educational usefulness of this simulation when its environment was excluding and when it was including them spatially. We found the teachers to perceive the viewer-including VR work situation as more useful for their teaching than the viewer-excluding version. This suggests that the spatial relation of viewer and environment in the VR work situation determined how the teachers perceived its educational usefulness in their classroom.

 

Publication:

Dobricki, M., Kim, K.G., Coppi, A.E., Dillenbourg, P., & Cattaneo, A. (2021). Perceived educational usefulness of a virtual-reality work situation depends on the spatial human-environment relation. Research in Learning Technology, 29. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v29.2453