Abstract:

Enhancing students’ creativity is one of the most important tasks in higher education. This is even more important in teacher training. Pre-service teachers have to learn not only how to be creative but they should also know how to encourage their future students to be creative.
For developing students’ creativity, we started to use some disruptive IT tools some years ago: eye tracking and virtual reality (VR). In a paper, we presented the results of a survey where we used an eye tracker and an eye tracking survey’s results for enhancing the students’ creativity and motivation in teacher training.

In this presentation we deal with the results of an experiment performed in a teacher training course: In this survey, we used a method for enhancing the students’ creativity by applying VR workspaces of the MaxWhere immersive VR system.

The VR spaces had two roles in this method:
(1) We used some VR environments for guiding the students through the course contents: the students could reach the course materials through these spaces. We offered collaborative methods for performing the courses’ tasks, and for solving the problems and the home works during the courses. The student could collaborate through these spaces. These spaces demonstrated some techniques on how to use such a VR environment in a creative and collaborative way.
(2) We provided a MaxWhere VR space as a “white and empty page” for the students that they had to fill with course materials and collaborative points.

The students had to choose a project theme from their professions. They had to evolve a working area for their students in this MaxWhere VR space. They had to design how to motivate their students to be creative and to be collaborative. Our university students had to implement this working space, fill it with digital learning materials for their students, where their future students could learn and work in almost a fully self-paced way and could use their creative skills.

In this research, we examined how the students can leave the clichés behind and can be creative in their tasks and in their working environment designs. Our experiences, the most positive outcomes, and some of the problems that have arisen are to be presented here.

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, VR, teacher training, creativity, developing creative skills, motivation, teaching computer science, computer science education.