The Impact of Immersive Virtual Reality on Effectiveness of Educational Games

Abstract

Games may come in a huge variety of different flavors. Virtual reality and educational games are two gaming areas that undergo active development at the moment, and there is a possibility that the use of VR in edutainment may be beneficial for education quality. In this thesis, we studied an impact that virtual reality might have on the effectiveness of some types of a game-based education. There were several studies on this topic before, and most of them emphasize the need for further research. The current thesis contributes to this area and differs from previous work in several aspects, one of which is the fact that in this thesis we evaluate the educational effectiveness of the game from different points of view: as the combination of participants objective learning, perceived learning, engagement, and motivation. We developed the educational game and performed an experiment with 30 participants, who were playing this game in either desktop or immersive VR setups. During the results analysis, we compared subjective experiences (gathered with the questionnaire) and measured gameplay statistics for these groups. Though some of the measured metrics had higher scores for the VR group, these differences were not statistically significant. Yet we managed to find a correlation between participants' engagement and at least perceived learning effectiveness. In the end, we state that there is a chance to verify the significance of our findings and find aspects of virtual reality that are beneficial for educational games in the future research, and outline its possible directions.