2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Unit Operations Laboratory (UOL) is a place where third year chemical engineering students can apply their engineering and science concepts on industry-scale equipment. However, the physical lab is resource intensive, requiring protective equipment and constant supervision. In addition, due to limited units for large group of students, students perform experiments according to rolling program schedule, making alignment with lecture teaching and hands-on learning challenge. The research team focuses on increasing the accessibility of the UOL Lab by using simulation gaming in standard, virtual reality and augmented reality modalities as an educational tool. The "Virtual Unit Ops Lab" application places students in an immersive simulated environment of the physical lab, where they can get practical experiences without the difficulties of an in-person lab by using specialized headsets and controllers which allows the student can physically move and interact with various parts of the machine. Developed with Unity, the application serves as a digital twin to allow for an immersive simulation of the full-scale lab equipment, in addition to enhanced learning features such as displaying the current step and providing visual/audio feedback for correct and incorrect actions. The application also supports multiplayer, where multiple students can communicate and discuss about their current step.
As a work in progress, a non-player-character chatbot is being developed for existing applications by using OpenAI's GPT-3.5, which provides designated information to a student in a conversational manner. Additionally, a supplemental "Augmented Unit Ops Lab" application uses Augmented Reality, which superimposes concepts/or flow diagrams onto the operational equipment are available through the view of a phone camera to support student learning during the in-person labs. The assisted learning technology are intended to individualize learning for more effective hands-on, experiential learning.