Potential for school familiarisation using Virtual Environments

Abstract Children generally find it traumatic to change schools. They fear losing their way or arriving late at classes as a result of their not knowing the spatial layout of the new school campus. Spatial disorientation is a source of anxiety and probably delays their academic progress. This may be especially so for children with motoric or cognitive disabilities, or children who are temperamentally unsuited to coping with change. There is great potential for the use of virtual environments to provide groups of children with the opportunity to explore the school environment before they arrive. Each "VE" child will be provided with a virtual version of their new school which they can navigate at ease within their own home, as many times as they like, prior to the start of their first term. Previous studies have confirmed that children (including pupils with disabilities) do acquire extremely good "cognitive spatial maps" of schools from virtual exposure alone. Following VE exposure, children will be tested for their spatial knowledge in school, emotional responses to school attendance, speed of settling-in, attitudes to teachers and other pupils, feelings of confidence, and anxiety level, also the speed with which they make academic progress in the first weeks at the new school. The VE-trained children will be compared with equivalent control groups given either a tour of the real campus, or no prior exposure. Subgroups of children might particularly benefit from virtual spatial pre-training, including children with disabilities or having poor directional sense

Mobile Augmented Reality Applications in Teaching: A Proposed Technology Acceptance Model

This study proposed MARAM, a mobile augmented reality acceptance model that determines the factors that affect teachers' intention to use AR applications in their teaching. MARAM extends TAM by adding the variables of perceived relative advantage, perceived enjoyment, facilitating conditions, and mobile self - efficacy. MARAM was tested in a pilot empirical study with 127 teachers who used educational mobile AR applications and developed their own ones. The results of regression analysis showed that MARAM can predict a satisfactory percentage of the variance in teachers' intention, attitude, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Attitude, perceived usefulness, and facilitating conditions affected intention. Both perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment affected attitude. Furthermore, perceived relative advantage and perceived enjoyment affected perceived usefulness. In addition, mobile self-efficacy and facilitating conditions affected perceived ease of use. However, perceived ease of use did not have any effect on attitude and perceived usefulness. MARAM could serve as the basis for future studies on teachers' acceptance of mobile AR applications and be expanded through the addition of other variables

Mikropoulus, T.A., Pantelidis, V.S., & Chen, C.J. (Eds.). (2009). Virtual Reality in Education [Special Issue]. Themes in Science and Technology Education. Greece: Klidarithmos [ISSN: 1791-3721].

This article elaborates on how the technical capabilities of virtual reality support the constructivistlearning principles. It introduces VRID, a model for instructional design and developmentthat offers explicit guidance on how to produce an educational virtual environment. Thedefine phase of VRID consists of three main tasks: forming a participatory team, analyzing theappropriateness of employing virtual reality technology to tackle a known learning problem,and performing a feasibility study. The design phase of VRID comprises the macro-strategythat provides guidance on the selection, sequencing, and organization of the subject-mattertopics that are to be presented, and the micro-strategy that provides strategies for effectivepresentation of the learning contents. The development phase includes all the necessary tasksto implement the outcome of the design phase. Among the tasks for this development phaseinclude determining the developmental platform, developing the various components of theeducational virtual environment, performing specialist evaluation as well as conducting oneto-one learner evaluation. Conducting a small group evaluation and performing an effectivenessevaluation study are the two important tasks of the evaluation phase