Abstract:

Technology and engineering students need to evolve a sense of what industrial systems are in order to be able to grasp various functionalities of systems in the industry. Johan de Kleer and his colleagues termed this sense as ‘Mechanistic Mental Models’ and described it as “the common intuition of ‘simulating the machines in the mind’s eye’.”

The author herein teaches a course titled ‘Risk Analysis and Management’ at Iowa State University (USA). The course heavily focuses on analyzing systems for risk and introducing barriers to control the risk. Conducting risk assessments on systems require familiarity with all aspects of systems, including how they operate and their relationship to the environment. Visualizing systems on 2D schematic drawings is the most common exposure to systems. However, 2D schematic drawings more often add confusion rather than help students evolve proper mental models of systems.

To address this concern, the author and his research team developed a full-scale, 3D, highly interactive virtual reality application titled Construct Virtual Reality (CVR). Students can use CVR to interact with systems and to design and build systems for desired industrial applications.

To assess whether working with CVR promotes developing proper mental models for systems, students used CVR in the following two settings:
(1) interacting with a virtual system that was already built in CVR; and,
(2) using CVR to design and build a system for a specific industrial application.

Students’ mental models were assessed after exposure to each one of the settings above. Order of exposure to the two settings were alternated to control for order bias.

Mental models were assessed along the following four dimensions:
(1) System topology: the structure of the system
(2) Envisioning: the inference process of determining the purpose or functionality of each component in the system
(3) Casual model: the ability to describe the overall function of the system in terms of how the components interact
(4) Running/Simulation: the ability to conduct mental simulation and anticipate system’s behavior.

The overall mental models are synthesized from the dimensions above. Then, the utility of CVR as a platform for enhancing systems’ mental models in this student population is documented and discussed.

References:
[1] Kleer, J. & Brown, J. S. (1983). Assumptions and Ambiguities in Mechanistic Mental Models. In D. Gentner & A. L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental models (pp. 155-190). Hilsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Pubs.

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, Mental Models.