An educational virtual reality game for learning historical events

This work presents the design, development, and evaluation of an exploration-based educational VR game for learning about historical Apollo lunar roving missions. The design and development are conducted with a three-phase progressive methodology that covers Modeling & Simulation, Gamification & Edufication, and VRization. The immersive experience presents the gamified content in an engaging way and enables learning activities through exploratory play. Players are given the choices of active and passive learning modes to explore the virtual lunar environment and learn spatial, factual, and operating knowledge. We run a user study to understand the learning effectiveness and engagement with this VR game and the influence of different learning modes on the learning outcomes. We discuss the findings and pedagogical implications that can be applied to the development of educational VR games for learning about similar historical events.