2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background: Visual and spatial literacy is a fundamental, yet often challenging, component of undergraduate engineering and science education. Developing these skills is essential for students to effectively interpret complex data, concepts, models, and systems prevalent in fields like biology, engineering, and computer science. Traditional classroom setups, limited laptop technology, and instructional constraints frequently hamper students' ability to collaboratively engage with highly complex visual data. The growing trend in data visualization research support and programming in libraries presents opportunities to collaborate with faculty to improve visual-spatial literacy in the libraries.

Purpose: We leverage specialized molecular visualization software, high-performance laptops, and the immersive classroom (which allows students to simultaneously display their modeling activity to a 217 degree class screen) within our library to host interactive, collaborative lab sessions that will facilitate students’ visualization of complex and abstract STEM concepts.

Scope: We describe our collaborative visualization project walking through the phases of the project. The phases included technology infrastructure, hiring and supporting a graduate assistant, recruiting faculty participants, activity adaptation, and activity execution. We then explore the impacts of our first pilot course of the project.

Results: Feedback we received from students and faculty indicate that the immersive classroom benefits their perceived learning, collaboration and troubleshooting experience.

Conclusion: We facilitated and coordinated a high impact learning experience. Enabling new applications of our libraries’ immersive classroom that supports real-time, collaborative troubleshooting and enhances students' ability to visualize the intricate process of molecular docking and drug design.