Eye-Tracking-Based Design of Mixed Reality Learning Environments in STEM

TL;DR

This paper proposes an empirically driven, user-centered design process for creating mixed reality educational environments in STEM, focusing on enhancing hands-on experiments with electric circuits using eye-tracking data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, empirically based framework for designing MR learning environments tailored to STEM hands-on experiments, emphasizing user-centered approaches.

Findings

Improved user engagement in MR STEM experiments

Enhanced understanding of electric circuits through MR visualization

Validated design process with real user testing

Abstract

With the advent of commercially available Mixed-Reality(MR)-headsets in recent years MR-assisted learning started to play a vital role in educational research, especially related to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education. Along with these developments it seems viable to further frameworks and structured design processes for MR-based learning environments. Instead of a widely applicable framework for designing educational MR applications, we here consider the case of virtually enhancing physical hands-on experiments in STEM, where students are given a certain problem to solve, and how to design these. For this focused realm, we suggest an empirically driven problemand user-centred design process for MR applications to get novices to act more like experts and exemplify it for a specific experiment and problem set containing a non-trivial electric circuit with capacitors and coils.