Research And Development
UPDATE: ChemSim-VR Prototype development by T.M.Wilcox at James Madison University ended June 30, 2017. See the slide deck for "A Virtual Reality Teaching and Learning Environment for Chemistry" and the associated paper presented at the 2018 AACE Conference in Amsterdam.
OVERVIEW
Research opportunities abound for virtual reality in education. Of particular interest is the well documented difference in spatial reasoning ability between men and women. In general, women have more difficulty mentally rotating three dimensional objects, a common aspect of STEM courses in secondary and higher education. Controversially, there are indications that traditional STEM 3D visualization schemas are biased toward men.
To help shed some light on this issue, WilcoxMedia, LLC (http://wilcoxmedia.com) are conducting research to identify how and where virtual reality can facilitate STEM spatial reasoning tasks that are especially difficult, particularly for women. The outcome of the study will inform instructional design decisions in software like ChemSim-VR.