Developing Virtual Reality Activities for the Astro 101 Class and Lab

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and testing of immersive VR activities for teaching complex 3D astronomy concepts like Moon phases and stellar parallax, demonstrating comparable effectiveness to traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces new VR-based educational activities for astronomy, including simulations on Universe Sandbox and Unity, and evaluates their efficacy in a large student cohort.

Findings

VR activities perform comparably to traditional teaching methods

Students successfully derived distance estimates using VR-based stellar parallax

VR can effectively illustrate complex 3D astronomical phenomena

Abstract

We report on our ongoing efforts to develop, implement, and test VR activities for the introductory astronomy course and laboratory. Specifically, we developed immersive activities for two challenging "3D" concepts: Moon phases, and stellar parallax. For Moon phases, we built a simulation on the Universe Sandbox platform and developed a set of activities that included flying to different locations/viewpoints and moving the Moon by hand. This allowed the students to create and experience the phases and the eclipses from different vantage points, including seeing the phases of the Earth from the Moon. We tested the efficacy of these activities on a large cohort (N=116) of general education astronomy students, drawing on our experience with a previous VR Moon phase exercise (Blanco (2019)). We were able to determine that VRbased techniques perform comparably well against other teaching methods. We also worked with the studentrun VR Club at San Diego State University, using the Unity software engine to create a simulated space environment, where students could kinesthetically explore stellar parallax - both by moving themselves and by measuring parallactic motion while traveling in an orbit. The students then derived a quantitative distance estimate using the parallax angle they measured while in the virtual environment. Future plans include an immersive VR activity to demonstrate the Hubble expansion and measure the age of the Universe. These serve as examples of how one develops VR activities from the ground up, with associated pitfalls and tradeoffs.