2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work in Progress: Developing a Virtual Reality Intervention Activity for Reinforced Concrete Design

Presented at Student Learning Experience, Behavior, and Engagement

In undergraduate programs, design choice autonomy of students is often overlooked for ease of summative and cumulative evaluation. Design choices, e.g. on which framing member to use or how to size the member and place reinforcement, is a 3-dimensional challenge. As a result, students often struggle with translating between the 2-D figures depicting strain, stress, and forces in their textbook or computer to the 3-D world in which they practice. Struggling with spatial reasoning is commonplace among civil engineering students as shown by existing work. Similarly, minimal emphasis is typically placed on physical experimentation in the laboratory, partly due to the substantial costs associated with large-scale laboratory demonstrations of reinforced concrete design. Even if such resources exist, demonstrations are limited in flexibility and repeatability, hindering students from exploring scenarios beyond the standard setup. This limitation restricts students' ability to independently investigate and discover at their own pace. As a potential solution, immersive technologies provide an inexpensive and flexible tool to complement theory-focused instruction by facilitating immediate feedback to students. Such a feedback loop enables students to adjust their design choices based on the outcomes of their design, thus contributing to experiential learning, and facilitating their journey from curiosity to creating engineering value.

Therefore, the main goal of this work in progress proposal is to develop a set of VR immersive experiences, called a module, to teach students about reinforced concrete design by interacting with real-time design options and visualizing their consequences. This proposal builds on three years of work by the researchers on VR by utilizing the entrepreneurial mindset learning framework to encourage students to explore the effects of design decisions and allow them to rapidly iterate on their design. This work in progress will present the framework for the module, the development in a virtual environment, and the planned assessment of the module in an upper-level reinforced concrete design course.

Authors

Casey Jane Rodgers http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6378-3386 University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Casey Rodgers is a PhD Candidate in Civil Engineering and a Masters student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She received her BS in Civil Engineering with a minor in Computer Science at Purdue University in May 2020 and received her MS in Civil Engineering at UIUC in May 2022. Her research interests focus on developing computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning solutions for structural health monitoring, post-disaster response, and engineering education problems.
Prof. Jacob Henschen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1031-2409 University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Professor Henschen completed his B.S., M.S., and PhD. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2007, 2009, and 2018 respectively. He was an Assistant Professor at Valparaiso University until he moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a Teaching Assistant Professor in June 2020. He serves as the co-chair for the Teaching Methods and Education Materials Committee at ACI and the co-chair of the Committee on Faculty Development at ASCE.
Prof. Ann C Sychterz Ph.D., P.Eng http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4000-6362 University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Ann Sychterz (SICK-tesh) is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. With her team at SMARTI lab, they harness geometrically nonlinear systems, such as tensegrity structures and origami, for adaptive civil infrastructure. She obtained her PhD in 2018 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) addressing the novel use of control algorithms, statistical diagnostic tools, and real-time feedback on a full-scale tensegrity structure to enable smooth deployability, damage detection, adaptation, and learning. She completed her masters and bachelors of science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Dr. Sychterz completed a postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan on actuator optimization of adaptive origami structures. She has funded projects by the National Science Foundation, the Illinois Department of Transportation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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