Virtual Reality Activities for Teaching Engineering Students Professional Development Skills

There has been a growing need to teach professional development skills to engineering students at Iowa State University. Students are often lacking these skills even though they are desired skills to have both for academic success and in the workplace. For our research, we are exploring using virtual reality to teach four professional development skills to students. These skills are leadership, teamwork, communication and ethics. We are using virtual reality as an innovative tool to teach students these skills in an interactive and fun environment. This work-in-progress paper will discuss the activities that are being developed to teach engineering students professional development skills at Iowa State University. In this paper, we will discuss three activities that are being developed to teach these four different professional development skills. Our framework for these activities is using Game Based Learning (GBL), which is based on Problem Based Learning (PBL). Each activity will be based on a problem that students must work together to solve. Through this interaction, students will learn one or more of the professional development skills outlined in this paper. The goals and learning outcomes of each activity will then be outlined and discussed in more detail. We will outline the execution of each activity and how the interaction between the students and the virtual reality system will be accomplished. In this paper, we will show our current work in progress of the development of the game environment used in these activities. This will include screen shots and other examples of the game environment for each activity. The development platform used for these activities is the Unity platform, a free game development software package that includes tools for working with virtual reality. The virtual reality headset that will be used with Unity will be the HTC Vive. This allows us to have an interactive environment where students can see and hear in the virtual space and use controllers to interact with objects in the virtual space. We are also adding physical props that can interact with the virtual space. The addition of these props is designed to allow multiple players to be involved while keeping costs low and increasing the portability of the system.