User-Centered Design and Exploratory Evaluation of an Immersive Virtual Reality Application for Volcano and Rover Activities with Students Aged 11–12

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in Mexico currently offers an opportunity to adopt immersive virtual reality (VR) as a supplement to teaching methods in elementary education. This article presents the user-centered design (UCD) and exploratory classroom evaluation of Vulcanus, an immersive VR application for volcano-related STEM activities aimed at elementary school students aged 11 to 12. The application combines guided audiovisual content, hand tracking, rover assembly, and robotic exploration tasks. Forty-eight students participated (24 per condition); the 24 VR users completed questionnaires on experience, discomfort, and usability. The results showed an adapted experience score of 32.12/40; the adapted 10-item distress scale yielded a descriptive mean of 5.37/30, and an adapted System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 69.23/100. The classroom intervention included historical knowledge questionnaires; however, their scores were excluded from the main findings because the original open-ended response scoring could not be independently audited. The contribution of this article is the design and exploratory evaluation of an educational VR application with hand tracking.