A VR Playground for Learning Abstract Mathematics Concepts

by Maria Roussou

In the past two decades, immersive virtual reality (VR) has attracted the attention of many researchers and educators who predicted that VR would considerably affect how learning and teaching are conducted. However, widespread uptake isn't yet apparent, and, despite the amount of successful research, we still know little about what exactly constitutes an effective virtual learning environment.

The research presented here aims to investigate how an interactive immersive virtual learning environment affects conceptual learning—in other words, how it affects the deeper, transferable understandings of abstract knowledge. The learning domain is mathematics, because it provides many examples of abstract problems that can conceptually challenge young and old alike.

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