Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in using virtual reality (VR) technology to benefit instruction, especially in physics and related subjects. As VR devices improve and become more widely available, there remains a number of unanswered questions regarding the impact of VR on student learning and how best to use this technology in the classroom. On the topic of electrostatics, for example, a large, controlled, randomized study performed by Smith et al. [A controlled study of stereoscopic virtual reality in freshman electrostatics, Proceedings of the 2017 Physics Education Research Conference, Cincinnati, OH, PER Conference series (2017), pp. 376–379], found that VR-based instruction had an overall negligible impact on student learning compared to videos or images. However, they did find a strong trend for students who reported frequent video game play to learn better from VR than other media. One possible interpretation of this result is that extended videogame play provides a kind of “training” that enables a student to learn more comfortably in the virtual environment. In the present work we consider if a VR training activity that is unrelated to electrostatics can help prepare students to learn electrostatics from subsequent VR instruction. We find that preliminary VR training leads to a small but statistically significant improvement in student performance on our electrostatics assessment. We also find that student reported game play is still correlated with higher scores on this metric.

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在静电教学中使用虚拟现实：培训的影响

近年来，人们对使用虚拟现实（VR）技术使教学受益的兴趣重新兴起，尤其是在物理和相关学科方面。随着VR设备的改进和广泛使用，关于VR对学生学习的影响以及如何在课堂上最好地使用该技术，仍然存在许多悬而未决的问题。以静电为主题，例如，史密斯等人进行的一项大型，受控，随机研究。[对新生静电学中的立体虚拟现实进行的对照研究，《 2017年物理教育研究会议论文集》，俄亥俄州辛辛那提，PER会议系列（2017年），第376–379页]，发现基于VR的教学总体上可忽略不计与视频或图像相比在学生学习方面的优势。但是，对于那些经常玩视频游戏的学生，他们确实发现了一种比其他媒体更好地学习VR的趋势。这种结果的一种可能解释是，扩展的视频游戏玩法提供了一种“培训”，使学生能够在虚拟环境中更加舒适地学习。在当前的工作中，我们考虑与静电无关的VR培训活动是否可以帮助学生从后续的VR指导中学习静电。我们发现，初步的VR培训在我们的静电评估中对学生的表现有微小但统计学上的显着改善。我们还发现，学生报告的游戏玩法仍然与该指标的较高分数相关。