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Empowering students with engineering literacy and problem-solving

through interactive virtual reality games

Conference Paper · January 2011

DOI: 10.1109/ICEGIC.2010.5716890 · Source: IEEE Xplore

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Empowering Students with Engineering Literacy and Problem-solving through Interactive Virtual Reality

Games

Ying Tang Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rowan University Glassboro, NJ, USA

tang@rowan.edu

Sachin Shetty Electrical and Computer Engineering

Tennessee State University Nashville, TN, USA sshetty@Tnstate.edu

Xiufang Chen Reading

Rowan University Glassboro, NJ, USA

chen@rowan.edu

Abstract—As radical and transformative technological revolution significantly changes the way of science and engineering practice, bringing these changes into engineering classroom becomes a need. This paper presents such a conduct that designs a virtual reality (VR) theme-based game system as a replacement of traditional laboratory activities in two fundamental electrical and computer engineering courses: digital design and circuit analysis. The goal is to strengthen students’ engineering literacy and problem-solving skills since the lack of effective reading and problem-solving strategies in our students poses significant barriers to their learning. With digital design and circuit analysis as the themes and engineers solving real-life problems as the scenes, the games immerse students in actual engineering design challenges where a selection of metacognitive reading and problem-solving strategies are unfolded.

Keywords-virtual reality; games; engineering literacy; metacognition; problem-solving

I. INTRODUCTION “What does this problem ask” is an oft-repeated phrase of

engineering students given a problem to solve. Although engineering faculty always strives to effectively teach problem solving, it seems that a deeper and underlying cause of the inefficacy is students’ reading comprehension. Reading is a critical skill for students to perform well academically. However, many students are poor readers, or have difficulty understanding expository texts [1]. The serious problems in students’ comprehension ability pervade content areas like engineering. Indeed, the fact that the United States lags behind the world in technological innovation [2] may reflect students’ limitations in reading as much as their knowledge of engineering and scientific contents and procedures. Research has shown that providing students with explicit reading strategy instructions improves their comprehension and learning [3].

Rowan University Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department offers a 4-year accredited undergraduate program with a total of 128 credits. The curriculum is fully packed with the contents ranging from math to electrical

engineering, and to computer engineering, leaving no space to add additional courses or contents without deleting others. Digital I, Network I and II are so-called “gateway” courses within our curriculum that teach our students digital logic design and engineering circuit analysis. They are foundational in that many of the upper level courses have a heavy reliance on the application of the concepts from them, and therefore poor performance often discourages students from continuing to pursue ECE as a career track. Instructors try to strike a balanced presentation of challenging concepts, facts, and learning strategies, but it seems that students always feel that there are too many detailed, progressively complex theories with few “real” engineering examples to relate. The lack of proper comprehension and problem-solving tactics adds additional frustration to students when they are asked to transform technical materials into forms that demonstrate their understanding and to apply knowledge in a variety of problem settings. Thus, it is crucial to come up some pedagogical methods that could improve our students’ engineering literacy with no modification to the current curriculum.

Over the past several years, cyber-infrastructure has emerged as an important framework for the current and future conduct of science and engineering, improving scholarly productivities and enabling breakthroughs not otherwise possible [4]. In particular, collaboration and communication in a visualization environment, including VR based games, simulations and modeling, provide a ubiquitous virtual learning environment for students. The pervasiveness of these technologies [5, 6], coupled with informal education initiatives, has positively impacted where and how individuals learn. Through networked educational environments, individuals can now obtain 24/7 learning on-demand. VR-based games clearly motivate users in ways that much conventional instruction, including online non-routine challenge problems, does not [7]. Virtual reality can help transform negative or fearful perceptions of science and engineering, helping learners to reason scientifically about naturally-occurring and human influenced events. Some have

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 0935089

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observed [8] that game players learn implicitly in the context of playing games, and are motivated to continue learning outside of the game in order to improve their game play. Simulations and models help provide insights into scientific concepts and phenomena [9, 10]. Difficult abstract concepts and large data sets can be accessed in ways that are more visual, interactive, and concrete. As such, simulations and models, and the games that incorporate them, have much to offer throughout a student’s learning experience.

Motivated by these general remarks, the work presented in this paper designs a VR game system that infuses meta-cognitive reading strategies into fully packed ECE curriculum, particularly in the context of more specific ECE knowledge domains: digital design and circuit analysis. Although progress has been reported on VR games for the educational purposes [11-14], relatively little effort has been focused on VR games for engineering students’ knowledge of and use of reading strategies, and its impact on academic performance. Therefore, the work presented in the paper is unique in that the VR game system not only provides students an attractive and motivating environment for tackling engineering design in general, but also imparts essential metacognitive reading and reasoning strategies to promote improved problem-solving skills.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the meta-cognitive reading interventions and the VR game design tools. Section III uses a specific game example to demonstrate the virtual learning environment where a selection of metacognitive reading and problem-solving strategies are unfolded. Section IV presents our attitude assessment results followed by the conclusions in Section V.

II. OVERVIEW OF DESIGN METHODOLOGY

A. Metacognitive Reading Strategies Reading to learn, like all learning, demands that readers

are “strategically engaged in the construction of meaning” [15]. This type of constructively responsive, thoughtful, and engaged reading clearly involves much more than simply having good decoding skills, adequate vocabulary, and an ability to recall what the text said [16]. Awareness and monitoring of one’s comprehension processes with active reading strategies are increasingly recognized as critical to successful, skilled reading. Such awareness and monitoring processes are often refer to as metacognition –“ the processes in which the individual carefully considers thoughts in problem solving situations through the strategies of self-planning, self-monitoring, self-regulating, self-questioning, self-reflecting, and or self-reviewing” [17]. Three important metacognitive reading interventions, Reading Road Map [18], What I Know-What I Want to Know- What I Have Learned (KWL) [19], and Think-Pair-Share (TPS), are carefully adapted and designed into the interactive game activities. Their integration with game themes are elaborated in detail in Section III.

B. VR Design Environment and Tools Today, producing interactive visualization and virtual

environments has become easy and cost-effective due to the emergence of virtual reality software tools, such as the Vizard Virtual Reality Toolkit used in this development [20]. The Vizard Toolkit provides us an object-oriented framework with many useful features, including OpenGL, VRML, multimedia, human biped, and efficient networking. In addition, it comes with many modules that support writing texts to files in various text formats such as XML, providing an easy way of retrieving student design solutions from the games for validation by third party software. The ability to create executable programs is another important aspect of the Vizard software, which makes our development easily transportable to any institution that wishes to adopt this innovation with no burden at all.

Vizard supports extensive 3D formats, allowing developers to have broad options of third party 3D model packages to create interactive contents offline and subsequently to import and render into the virtual world. Autodesk Maya is the one used in our development. As shown in Fig. 1, a 3D tree object is created from Maya (the up panel of Fig. 1) to Vizard (the highlighted python code in the bottom panel of Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Example on the content creation from Maya to Vizard

Python language is the core medium embedded in Vizard for programming logic. By encompassing OpenGL, DirectX

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multimedia, human bipeds, display and peripheral hardware interfaces, and efficient networking, the platform frees developers from low-level programming and makes it feasible for an individual faculty or student without programming experience to leap into the world of interactive content. Fig. 2 shows the car animations in Vizard, where initialize_car () function defines a car boundary box around cars, so they won’t collide with each other; and increase_right_single ()/increase_right_double () and increase_left_single ()/increase_left_double () functions account for a car moving on the single/double lane road.

Choosing the Vizard software allows us to have a full control of all creations, from 3D models to animations to network-enabled functionalities. The biggest advantage in comparison to using commercial games is that engagement and learning are carefully balanced in our development [21].

Fig. 2: Python programming for car animation in Vizard

C. Game Themes and Design As stated in Introduction, this project aims at designing a

fun learning environment that promotes strategic, constructive, and big-picture reading, thinking and problem solving.

Considering the entertaining, experiential and problem-based nature of games, the virtual reality game system then fits perfectly into this scope to effectively bring to students knowledge and skills that might otherwise be just bullet points on slides. The development focuses on theme-based treasure hunting games, where players are asked to search for the treasure (e.g., a valuable solution to a particular engineering design problem) with the given map (e.g., the problem statement) along with a sequence of audible and visual clues (e.g., reading interventions). The two themes being chosen are Digital Adventure for the introductory digital design courses and Power Up! for the foundation circuit courses. A series of games under each theme are then implemented as a replacement to the traditional lab experiments in the target courses at our institution.

III. VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT AND INTERACTIVE DEMONSTRATION

To further demonstrate the well-balanced engagement and learning occurring in our game system, the section presents a game example The Mystery of Traffic Light under the Digital Adventure theme to elaborate the integration of fun, metacognitive reading interventions and engineering problem-solving.

The application of digital logic in a traffic light control has several advantages. It is a practical and real-world example that students can associate in terms of its functionality and importance. The design, as a typical sequential machine, can be very daunting, with all functional and timing requirements, as well as race, hazard and synchronization conditions that could occur, and should be designed against. Each student is required to log in the system with a security password to play a game. A prologue narrative is then provided by introducing Jack, an engineer character frustrated by the busy and messy traffic at the intersection with a malfunctioning traffic light shown in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3: Character Jack frustrated at the traffic intersection

To enable the network functionalities that allow students to play with their on-line group members where ideas and

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knowledge are share, our design chooses the client/server architecture. Only the instructor has the access to the server program, where he/she can set up the group size and communication levels (e.g., group level or global) depending on the complexity of the game. At the client site, when a player logs in, his/her login ID then becomes visible to other players in the group if the communication level is set as group level for the game. Then, he/she can initiate a conversation with the online group members by clicking the “Show Chat Box” on the game interface. As shown in Fig. 4, three persons (i.e., students 1, 2, and 3) in the same group are online and chatting each other. It is in such collaboration that much of the learning occurs and an optimal solution results from.

Fig. 4: Game interface with two group members online

In the game, Jack invites players to join him in finding a solution to regulate the traffic lights in a logical manner that fits the current traffic flow of the intersection better. He then takes them to visit an elderly knowledgeable fellow who participated in the design of the old traffic light controller. With the fellow’s keen insights into efficient design process, a road map of design guidance is presented to students as shown in Fig. 5. The road map is composed of a set of milestones and actions, providing students an expert view of what takes to solve a problem. This therefore caters extremely well to the majority of players that adopt sequential learning. Stressing the big picture of the trip and the relevant facts to the larger whole is an important addition to address the minority of global learners who might otherwise be frustrated by the traditional methods.

While players walk through the map and advance from one stage to another, they continue to synthesize their design ideas in the KWS datasheet – a 3-column chart structure adapted from KWL as What I Know-What I Want to Know- What I have Solved (KWS) (Fig. 6).

When the player comes up a solution, he/she then walks into the control room, where he/she uploads his/her Hardware Description Language (HDL) code. The game system then

calls for the third party synthesis software to validate the code at back-end, and displays any errors that code might have. As shown in Fig. 7, the code the player loaded in has several syntax errors. In this case, the player then has the options to go back to the road map, KWS, or online chatting for further debugging. Of course, if the solution passes the synthesis stage, its logic is validated through the responses of the traffic lights.

Fig. 5: The road map

Fig. 6: The player enables his KWS sheet

IV. PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT As Glesne stated [22], “Qualitative studies are best at

contributing to a greater understanding of perceptions, attitudes, and processes”. Our project conducted in-depth interviews with four selected participants in each of the three courses offered last year: Digital I, Network I, and Network II. Among the four students being chosen for each class according to their academic performance, two represent the average level, and the other two represent the low and the high levels respectively, since we believe most students fall in the average group. Since the project is work-in-progress, the qualitative data is only drawn from the control group that has no access to the VR games being developed. Even though, the findings provide very useful insights for our development as elaborated below:

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• As to the attitude towards using VR games in labs, students all expressed their interest. They believe VR games in lab are interesting and motivational especially with a story line. It can be useful in helping them understand and learn concepts and skills. However, at the same time, some of them voiced their concerns that VR games might miss the importance of engineering hands-on experience. The implementation of VR games should be step by step to ensure students understand how to use it. They expected more meaningful and authentic lab experience in the future

• Regarding students’ comprehension of textbooks and directions provided in lab, students expressed that they don’t like their textbooks since they are too dense, thorough, and confusing. They also don’t like any directions with long statements. They do expect that VR games integrated with reading strategies could help them better comprehend concepts and directions, and consequently improve their problem-solving skills.

Fig. 7: The game interface for the users to upload their HDL

code and display any syntax errors

V. CONLUSION This paper presents a non-intrusive approach that infuses

metacognitive reading strategies into fully packed Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) curriculum. In particular, a theme-based VR game system is being developed to train ECE students as content learners with a repertoire of effective problem-solving and metacognitve strategies. The learning materials provide an attractive and engaging environment for students to draw out their understanding of engineering texts, transform factual information into usable knowledge, and consolidate their perceptions of information through integrated real-life design applications, ensuring high quality education.

With no additional software and hardware required, the game system can be installed, configured, and run in any personal computer, making the development cost effective and easily transportable.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like acknowledge the help of Richard

Jassel and David Carbonetta in development of Python code and creation of the screen shots reported in the work.

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