Work-in-Progress—Virtual Learning Laboratories for High School Chemistry Lab: An Immersive Learning User Study

Abstract

In this work-in-progress, we investigate the outcome of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) teaching chemistry at high school level. The question we raised was whether or not a virtual representation of chemistry labs would have a comparable impact to the learning experience with a real live lab. We identified several challenges for the VLE such as tangibility and a necessary degree of realism for chemical reactions. We created a representation of a chemistry lab in VR, designed to administer several chemical experiments, which can be found in K-12 chemistry courses, and tested a group of participants using the VLE against a testgroup in real life in terms of learning outcome and immersive perception using a modified game experience questionnaire. We found, that our results strongly indicate a comparable learning experience of our virtual chemistry lab environment in comparison with a real life lab for our specific experiments.