Enhancing student experiential learning opportunities in materials science through the development of online virtual laboratories

Authors: Bosco Yu, Robert Cicoria, Andrew Lucentini, Mymoon Bhuiyan, Hatem Zurob Traditional laboratory activities tend to involve the teaching assistants performing demonstrations while the students either passively observe or repeat the tasks performed by the TA. Due to limited resources and lab times, there is little opportunity to explore "what if" scenarios and to understand the importance/consequences of certain steps in the procedure. This year, McMaster University faced a major challenge as well as an opportunity to reimagine the classroom: designing a new curriculum for the first-year engineering course with a class size of ~1200 students. How can we promote students hands-on experience in their laboratories during a pandemic when students are studying remotely from locations all around the world? We seek to turn this into an opportunity to improve the students' educational experience for years to come. In this study, we will present two of our ongoing pedagogical developments for our engineering students regarding virtual materials science laboratories: i) Scientific Emulators, and ii) Virtual Reality apps. - Scientific Emulators: For those topics where scientific theories are well-established, it is possible to develop highly realistic scientific emulators. For instance, we are developing a virtual materials processing and mechanical testing lab. These emulators act as interactive educational games, allowing students to play with different options to solve an engineering problem and thereby gain solid understanding of the scientific principles involved (learning-by-doing). - Virtual Reality apps: For those topics where "computer animation physics" are not available, we plan to develop a low-cost interactive Virtual Reality app where lab activities are recorded using 360 cameras. Students will work on a design problem by choosing between pre-selected options and seeing the pre-recorded outcome. Thus, students can walk through the whole experiment step by step. In both cases, students will be able to interact with these virtual science laboratories and gain more in-depth experience than they would in observing highly crowed in-person laboratories. We believe that the development of virtual science laboratories will benefit students even after the pandemic. During the conference, the ongoing progress of the development of these virtual science laboratories will be presented in detail.