WHAT?
"EnReality" (English Reality) is a serious educational VR game for learning English.
As I mentioned above, target audience of this game are beginners learners of English (A2-B1). In the future, teachers can adapt the game for more advanced students.Game objectives:- increase student engagement in learning English
- reduce the time spent on improving the level of language proficiency
- satisfy the need of students for visualization of content
- personalization of learning
- initial vocational guidance of students
This game will help achieve the designated learning goals due to its interactivity, game and learning mechanics, and virtual environment capabilities.
WHY?
According to Gartner's 2020 report, VR for education will become increasingly popular because of the many benefits and capabilities:- VR increases students' engagement and motivation, because of the actional, symbolic/narrative, sensory, social, psychological immersion;
- VR can "transform the abstract to the concrete", allows students to manipulate reality and do rather than only observe, makes the infeasible or impossible practical;
- VR improves the transfer of learners' knowledge. "Transfer is the application of knowledge learned in one situation to another situation";
- VR helps to reduce the cognitive load and can reduce costs for educational equipment.
In addition, the VR environment opens up new possibilities for collecting learning insights (eye-tracking, the number of prompts requested, how long the learners did the assignment and so on).So, in my graduate project for my Msc, I decided to develop a serious educational VR game to show the potential applications of this technology for education.HOW?
To make this project I had to go though 5 big steps:
- Conduct research, paying particular attention to Instructional design principles for educational VR;
- Make a Moodle course, based on theory from my research;
- Write the description of the main game concept, learning and game mechanics, plot and characters;
- Develop prototypes in Unreal Engine;
- Make a final presentation to describe my project in a concise and visually comprehensible way
You can look at final presentation and VR prototypes below.