Training in Virtual Reality

Client

Year

Awards & Mentions

Two prestigious universities in Sri Lanka reached out to us hoping to find resources that could empower their graduate and doctorate students studying various facets of engineering They had heard that VR based training had been attempted and successful in our in-house CodeGen Team House and wished to tap into our expertise to develop similar solutions that could leverage personalized learning experiences and be implemented within their CloudSmartSchool subscription. Throughout our sprint, we leveraged numerous research methods and evaluated industry-standard learning design methodologies i.e ADDIE, Kirkpatrick Method, etc. to hone in on the individual needs that many students were facing. We had access to a helpful data set as many of the students were already utilizing the CloudSmartSchool which offered access to courses related to programming and engineering, many of which were designed in-house by my team and engineers at CodeGen for our DigitalMentor platform. Thus, our target became how we could further make the process more engaging by incorporating our virtual reality expertise to create new experiences for learners. With helpful input from professors and PhD supervisors, we had a constant stream of access to where they felt their students were facing knowledge cracks that were in need of filling.

Some of our most successful VR based programs included helping out budding hardware and product engineers get a better grasp of the work environments they would be working in and the tools at their disposal. Utilizing virtual worlds we were able to create near 1:1 workshops and labs that utilized the same tools such as CNC machines, Forklifts, Industrial printers, and other technology that would otherwise be very difficult to relate to in a classroom setting. The students were able to not only see these technologies but also interact with them and learn basic use cases all within confined virtual environments that could be booted up and re-stimulated at scale with zero risks. Utilizing our VR course authoring stack, which allowed for quizzes during simulations we were able to offer professors and supervisors controls and measures to gauge the effectiveness of the various VR solutions.

We found that students who used these immersive tools performed tasks both in real-world testing and in-classroom examinations nearly twice as accurately and 1.5x faster than their equivalent peers who utilized traditional learning methods (A/B testing). Further examination through Kirkpatrick’s methods revealed that our innovations had led to the behavior and results we were looking for, and more excitingly the learners had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to their experience. Due to VR’s clear advantage as a training tool, we doubled down on our efforts and extended our solution to students of the universities who were on CodeGens intern track, we now wanted to create effective means of onboarding them to their relevant teams and getting them up to speed as quickly as possible with minimal resource consumption of our project managers. Our solution was once again to utilize the VR world to create field trips to various company sites, labs, and project tutoring sessions, the culmination of which gave students a far more “direct experience” with the company and their new responsibilities than simply reading, or hearing about it. Our success brought forth new initiatives and drive towards helping both universities convert many in-person instructional materials to virtual settings, where we are able to tap into many of the tools we have developed to enhance the learner experience.