Developing Virtual Reality Activities for the Astro 101 Class and Lab
Gur Windmiller, Philip Blanco, William F. Welsh

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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsScience Education and Pedagogy · Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts · Educational Games and Gamification
