Abstract:

This paper shows the impact of the Wildlife Virtual Reality application and Virtual Lab on increasing knowledge acquisition when deployed to students with hearing impairments. The Wildlife application is part of the EU project NEWTON Earth Course pilot deployed in the Special Vocational School for students with hearing impairments St. Maria Bucharest, Romania. 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 multiple sensorial media (mulsemedia) delivery, Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)-enhanced learning, Virtual teaching and learning Labs (VL), Fabrication Labs and Gamification. These technologies are used in conjunction with self-directed, game-based and problem-based learning methods.

In order to demonstrate the benefits of NEWTON project technologies, proof of concept educational VR and AR applications, games, and VL focused on STEM were developed and tested in diverse pilots across different European countries in primary, secondary and third level educational institutions.

The Wildlife application was developed by the NEWTON project partner SIVECO Romania. It involves 3D immersive computer-based VR and VL simulations and provides educational content on a set of animals, including deer, wolf, wild boar, fox, moose, brown bear, hare and lynx. Two separate environments are created for each animal: a nature VR environment, where the participating learners need to find the animal in its own environment and learn about it and a VL environment, where a closer view of each animal is presented as well as additional educational information is offered related to the animal.

The study described in this paper included 30 students with hearing impairments aged between 13 and 15. They were exposed to two Wildlife stages labelled Wildlife 1 and Wildlife 2. Wildlife 1 included the nature VR environments describing all the animals, whereas Wildlife 2 included the VL related to all the animals. The evaluation process included the following steps: before the deployment of each Wildlife application, a knowledge pre-test was administrated to all participants and after the student interaction with the Wildlife application, knowledge post-tests and motivation and affective state questionnaires were administrated.

Data collected was analysed and the results show an increase in knowledge acquisition for all students, as follows. Wildlife 1 pre-test results: minimum 0 points (pts) and maximum 4 pts, with mean=1.83, whereas Wildlife post-test results: minimum 1 pts and maximum 6 pts., with mean=3.76. Wildlife 2 pre-test results: minimum 0 pts, and maximum 5 pts, with mean=1.70 and post-test results: minimum 1 pts and maximum 7 pts, with mean=3.93. The results of a t-test for paired-sample show that the difference between means of the pre-test and post-test, for both lessons, are statistically significant. This demonstrates the benefit of using NEWTON VR and VL to improve knowledge acquisition during technology-enhanced learning with the NEWTON project approach.

Regarding students’ motivation and affective state, the majority of students (86,4%) reported that they enjoy learning with NEWTON. Additionally 78.1% of students would like to use more technologies in the classroom when they are learning STEM subjects.

Keywords:

Special Educational Needs, Technology-Enhanced Learning, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Virtual Labs.