SBIR Phase I: Virtual Reality Based Curriculum for Increased STEM Engagement

This SBIR Phase I project will develop Virtual Reality (VR) based curriculum for first year university science courses. VR has the potential to create a step change in the way STEM education is taught and ultimately the way students learn. This project aims to build VR science curriculum to make science education more accessible, engaging and effective, and turn traditional STEM leavers into stayers which will positively impact STEM retention to meet the U.S. workforce demand. The VR science curriculum will be used alongside the existing curriculum at universities, with students participating in one 30-minute virtual lesson a week. The effect of these lessons on the students' performance will be measured to validate the ability of VR to positively impact learning outcomes. This project supports the NSF mission by progressing the science of education, by developing education tools using the scientific method, and measuring effectiveness. Moreover, the focus on improving university science education will improve the workforce pipeline, creating more and better prepared scientists. The products resulting from the proposed work will make science more accessible preparing today's students to be tomorrow's inventors, problem solvers and next great minds. The intellectual merit of this project is in the approach to developing VR curricula, and continually validating each curriculum by using data science to correlate student performance in the lesson to their performance in the classroom. Each lesson combines exposition, active learning, problem-based inquiry and assessment into self-contained modules which can be added to any existing curriculum. Student actions, and concept mastery are tracked within each lesson; ultimately, to correlate what the student is doing in a VR lesson to their learning outcome in real time. This enables the project team to validate which components of each lesson are working to improve student learning outcomes, and continually refine the VR pedagogy. This approach to developing each lesson and the cycle of refinement is the key innovation of the project team. The goal of the proposed research is to evaluate the magnitude of learning outcome improvement achieved when VR lessons are added to existing curricula, correlate the student actions in the VR lesson to their learning outcome as measured through in-class assessments, and evaluate perceived implementation hurdles for use of VR by instructors. This will be accomplished by integrating VR lessons in university curriculum and measuring the results against a control group. Instructor feedback will be gathered through a mixed methods study. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.