2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Connecting Campus and Community: Applying Virtual Reality (VR) Technologies to Facilitate Energy Justice and Emerging Technology Literacy

Presented at Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering Division (TELPhE) Technical Session 1

The history of energy technology development (including nuclear energy) demonstrates that the process of designing, developing, and using energy technologies creates significant inequities – extractive and waste management facilities are typically sited around communities of color and low-income communities whereas the power-producing facilities are sited around affluent (predominantly white) communities. In neither case do communities actually have a say in the type of facility being built in their community and seldom have a say in the decision to even site that facility. If we are to equitably develop our energy systems of the future, there is an urgent need to reverse this worrying trend. To that end, we aspire to train future developers of nuclear energy technologies – fission and fusion – to acknowledge and incorporate social, ethical, and environmental considerations in their engineering practice as well as seek direct community input in the early stages of design. In this paper, we report on our development and use of VR models of nuclear energy systems as immersive tools for learning and community engagement in a “living lab” (Hossain et al. 2020) style format.

The VR models developed for the course lab sessions include 'exploded' versions of fission and fusion systems that enable students to view the systems as a whole and disassemble them into their constituent parts (which can then be labeled). Another set of models allows the students to tour the fission and fusion facilities (as a second-person player video game) and explore how the nuclear (fission or fusion reactor) and non-nuclear systems (turbine generator, heat sinks) combine to form an energy facility. As part of the course living lab sessions, students use the VR models to offer tours of the facility to community participants. In addition to using the VR models as teaching tools, the teaching team is also testing the efficacy of these models as tools for community engagement. This engagement offers opportunities to co-create clean energy infrastructure with communities and engineers working together. Living labs offer the opportunity to develop and test qualitative research methods as students prepare for a series of community engagement workshops.

Authors

Prof. Aditi Verma University of Michigan [biography]

Aditi Verma (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan. Aditi is broadly interested in how fission and fusion technologies specifically and energy systems broadly—and their institutional infrastructures—can be designed in more creative, participatory, and equitable ways. To this end, her research group at the University of Michigan works towards developing a more fundamental understanding of the early stages of the design process to improve design practice and pedagogy, and also improve the tools with which designers of complex sociotechnical systems work.
She was previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Prior to her appointment at the Belfer Center, Aditi worked at the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, her work, endorsed and funded by policymakers from the NEA member countries, focused on bringing epistemologies from the humanities and social sciences to academic and practitioner nuclear engineering, thus broadening their epistemic core. At the NEA, Aditi also led the establishment of the Global Forum on Nuclear Education, Science, Technology, and Policy.
Aditi holds undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Nuclear Science and Engineering from MIT. Her work, authored for academic as well as policymaking audiences, has been published in Nuclear Engineering and Design, Nature, Nuclear Technology, Design Studies, Journal of Mechanical Design, Issues in Science and Technology, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Inkstick.
Aditi enjoys hiking with her dog, reading speculative fiction, and experimenting in the kitchen.
Kellie Grasman University of Michigan [biography]

Kellie Grasman serves as an instructor in Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. She holds graduate degrees in engineering and business administration from the University of Michigan, and began te
Dr. Katie Snyder University of Michigan [biography]

Dr. Snyder is a lecturer for the Program in Technical Communication at the University of Michigan. She teaches design, ethics, and technical communication as social justice to students in the College of Engineering.
Sara Elizabeth Eskandari

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