Promoting rural and regional STEM education with VR-haptics

The challenge

Haptic feedback technologies increasingly feature in our everyday lives, for example, in smart phones and other touchscreen devices; fitness trackers and smart watches; haptic pagers and alarms; and in video and virtual reality (VR) game controllers. These everyday devices allow us to send and receive signals via touch. Haptics technologies also offer possibilities for enhancing the teaching of concepts and skills that are otherwise difficult to learn due to practical, financial, ethical, and safety challenges. Because this technology enables simulations that escape the confines of human scales in time and space, haptics can also support learning experiences that would otherwise be impossible to facilitate.

Applications of VR-haptics for education and training have been developed for industry training and higher education settings, but their use in school settings is rare. Beyond the everyday devices noted above, very few schools have access to haptics devices for learning and very little suitable content exists for teaching school curriculum. Additionally, schools are rightly wary of investing in new technologies because of the risk that initial novelty supports interest that is not sustained over time and doesn’t deliver the benefits imagined by developers. Yet haptic-enabled VR learning would offer important benefits to school learning, potentially enhancing student engagement, enhancing curriculum learning, and providing students with access to new skill sets that will feature in the industries of the future.

For curriculum learning, VR-haptics can provide students with sensory learning experiences to explore concepts that are otherwise very abstract and difficult to understand. Many school students in Australia have experienced haptics technologies in their homes through video and VR gaming, so they already have skills in using haptics controllers and using haptics to manipulate digital objects. School usage has the potential to connect students’ out-of-school informal learning with in-school curriculum learning and through this to enhance students’ interest and engagement in school. Additionally, using VR-haptics in schools provides an opportunity for all students to develop this new skill set and to have insights into the types of experiences and learning that can be supported via this technology.

Warrnambool College students using VR equipment.