Abstract:

There is an increasing interest in offering rich educational content not only to students with typical development, but also to students with special educational needs. This paper demonstrates the benefit of using the Sealife Virtual Reality (VR) application and Virtual Lab (VL) on increasing learning experience when deployed to children with hearing impairments. This VR and VL application was developed part of the EU project NEWTON and was deployed within the Earth Course pilot in the Special Vocational School St. Maria Bucharest, Romania. This is a special school attended by students with hearing impairments. The NEWTON project is a large EU Horizon 2020 project, with 14 partners from 7 countries. The NEWTON project designs, develops and deploys innovative technology-rich solutions for delivering STEM content. These technologies include adaptive and personalised multimedia and mulsemedia delivery, Augmented Reality (AR) and VR-enhanced learning, VL, Fabrication Labs and Gamification. These technologies are used in conjunction with self-directed, game-based and problem-based learning methods.

Following the design of the diverse NEWTON project technologies, proof of concept educational VR and AR applications, games, and VL targeting STEM topics were produced and deployed in diverse real-life use cases in different European countries in educational institutions at various levels.

The Sealife application was designed to target educational content related to sea creatures for primary and secondary level students. It focuses on a VR environment of an aquatic world and presents descriptions of various water animals, including dolphin, jellyfish, octopus, orca, turtle, clownfish, puffer fish, seahorse, shark and stingray. The Sealife application consists of a two stage 3D immersive computer-based VR and VL simulations. For each sea creature in the first stage there is a nature VR environment, within which the participating learners are asked to search for the animal in its own environment and learn different facts related to it. In the second stage a VL environment is set up, and the learners can get a close 3D view of each animal and have access to additional educational data related to it.

The St. Maria-hosted pilot presented in this paper involved 30 secondary school students with hearing impairments. The pilot included two parts of the Sealife application. Sealife 1 centers on the nature VR environments within which the sea animals live. Sealife 2 includes VLs which describe all the sea creatures in more details. Learning satisfaction was assessed using motivation and affective state questionnaires.

Data analysis showed how the students expressed a limited appreciation of science classes before using the Sealife application (e.g 53.7% of participants stated did not like science classes or were undecided about their feelings related to them). However following post-test data analysis, the large majority of students of 86.4% reported that they enjoy learning with NEWTON Sealife application. 78.1% of them suggested that they would like to use more technologies in the classroom when learnimng STEM subjects (i.e. 53.7% answered ”agree” and 24.4% responded with ”strongly agree”). This demonstrates the benefit of using NEWTON Sealife VR and VL application to improve student learning satisfaction during technology-enhanced learning.

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, Virtual Labs, Technology-Enhanced Learning, Students with Hearing Impairments.