A virtual reality role-playing serious game for experiential learning

ABSTRACT

Educational systems can benefit from Virtual Reality’s (VR) ability to support experiential learning. In particular, VR based games, especially role-playing serious games (RPGs), can promote learning through the simulation of various educational scenarios. This study proposes an immersive VR-RPG to educate players about the behavior of honeybees. The player adopts the role of a honeybee and experiences a virtual world mimicking the real one from the honeybee’s perspective. Unlike most studies in educational VR, we assess the impact of immersion on knowledge gain by testing the players’ knowledge on the subject before, immediately after, and one week following the use of the system. We also compare the proposed system with both a conventional and a desktop VR-RPG approach. The results indicate that students significantly gained knowledge in all methods compared to the pre-test. We found that the immersion level for both tested VR-RPGs did not have a significant effect on learning. However, the study showed an improvement in knowledge retention for the desktop VR-RPG users compared to those of the conventional method. Moreover, the results revealed that users of the immersive and desktop VR-RPGs were more motivated and engaged compared to those of the conventional method.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual Reality
• immersive
• HMD
• role-playing
• serious games
• learning effectiveness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Enas Abdulrahman Alrehaili

Enas Abdulrahman Alrehaili has just completed her M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Ottawa. She received the B.Sc. degree in computer science from Taibah University, Saudi Arabia.

Hussein Al Osman

Hussein Al Osman received the B.A.Sc. in computer engineering, M.A.Sc. in electrical engineering, and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa, in 2007, 2008, and 2014, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa and leads the Multimedia Processing and Interaction Group. He is also the Associate Director of the Electronics Business Technologies inter-disciplinary program at the University of Ottawa. His research in human computer interaction, affective computing, and multimedia systems over the past 10 years has earned several recognitions such as the IEEE Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications 2008 best paper award. His research has been funded by public organizations (e.g. NSERC, MITACS) and private collaborators and has produced over 40 research articles, 2 patents, and several technology transfers.