2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress continues to build upon previous work that aims to explore the effectiveness of teaching and learning fundamental industrial robotics skills using industrial robotics software with consumer-grade virtual reality (VR) equipment. The initial goal of the project was to create an innovative curriculum designed to provide students with an immersive robotics education experience. In our curriculum, students program and create simulated robotic work cell digital twins using VR. Previous findings indicated that students found programming robots in VR to be simpler than programming on a real controller, despite most participants being new to VR. All participants agreed that using VR helped them better understand how to program a robot as well.
This paper outlines our approach to understand this feedback by examining how students in an applied robotics class perceive a jogging exercise when performed in a physical setting versus a virtual environment. To this end, students will first jog a robot using traditional, physical controllers, and then perform a similar jogging task in VR. Their feedback will help us determine: Do students perceive a robotics task differently in VR compared to the real-world version in terms of difficulty, engagement, and learning effectiveness? Implementation of curriculum improvements, anticipated steps for collecting and analyzing new feedback, and possibilities for future research are also discussed.