2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Building a self-guided Virtual Reality learning tool for Electromagnetism

Presented at Hands-on Learning and Industry-Relevant in ECE Curriculum Development

The three-dimensional nature of electromagnetism concepts does not translate well to two-dimensional platforms, making it difficult for students to build intuition about these phenomena in traditional learning settings. Virtual Reality (VR), a simulated three-dimensional environment, offers an immersive, realistic, and interactive 3D environment that enables students to visualize complex concepts and actively manipulate these abstractions.

This paper discusses the development, implementation, and assessment of a self-guided tool designed to teach engineering students the most fundamental concepts in the theory of electromagnetism: Maxwell’s equations. The self-guided and adaptable nature of VR-based learning allows students to adjust the difficulty level and control the pace of their progress, enabling them to tackle increasingly complex topics. This personalized approach has the potential to foster a deeper understanding and a sustained interest in the topic.

To assess the tool’s efficacy, in-game conceptual quizzes measure students' understanding. Additionally, headset-tracking technology captures user eye-tracking data, providing valuable insights to guide the experience design decisions.

Authors

Prof. Raluca Ilie http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-7305-2579 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Prof. Ilie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her primary research is the development and application of high-performance, first principles computational models to describe and predict the conditions in near-Earth space leading to geomagnetic storms.
Prof. Ilie’s research focus is on developing new approaches to study the dynamics of plasmas and electromagnetic fields in the geospace environment, and to advance the predictive capabilities of the complex dynamics occurring in the solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere system. She combines both theoretical and observational work to develop predictive tools that form the basis of operational warning systems and hazard mitigation.

Prof. Ilie has been recognized as an emerging leader in education by her selection to the Strategic Instructional Innovations Program, to develop Virtual reality (VR) simulations and learning environments to support student learning for electrical engineering courses.

Prof. Ilie earned her Ph.D in Space and Planetary Physics from the University of Michigan and has been an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. As part of the Center for the Space Environment Modeling at University of Michigan, she was a core member of the software developing team for the Space Weather Modeling Framework. She is a recent awardee of the NSF CAREER, NASA Heliophysics Early Career Investigator and Air Force Young Investigator Program awards.
Nan Kang University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Nan Kang is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also earned her B.S. degree. She is currently collaborating with Prof. Raluca Ilie to develop a self-guided virtual reality learning tool focused on enhancing the study of electromagnetism. Additionally, she serves as a research assistant in the Immersive Learning Lab, where she contributes to projects at the intersection of technology and education, creating innovative tools that foster interactive and engaging learning experiences.

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