Virtual reality (VR) is gaining momentum in education as institutions seek to integrate technology in their teaching methods. STEM students face difficulties in comprehending many abstract complex concepts that are typically studied in Labs. This situation worsens with hardware failure and lack of pedagogical tools. The main goal of this paper is to investigate the impact of VR environment on learning advanced and complex STEM concepts. Additionally, it explores the impact of gamification on the learning experience of STEM students. To measure such impact, we developed VR application that simulates laboratory course in CS/CE, namely, digital design & computer organization. We conducted experiments and surveyed university students to measure the learning experience and the impact on learning improvement. Our results show that students who are using VR application perform better than students who use traditional learning. The analysis of the survey indicates that 90% of the participants found that the VR gamification experience was fun and encouraged competitive behavior and contributed to better understanding of the materials. This study reveals the importance of VR environment in engineering education. VR environment makes the learning experience more entertaining and less tedious especially when dealing with complex abstract engineering concepts.
Al-Nuaimi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.