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For educational purposes, virtual reality (VR) is often used to produce life-like experiences. However, the use of haptic feedback in educational practices for science and mathematics remained understudied. Haptically-enabled science simulations (HESSs) enable students to physically experience the concepts being taught via haptic feedback. We present a study on the effect of a buoyancy HESS designed to aid in the understanding of basic physics concepts. We hypothesize that introducing both visual and haptic feedback of the underlying simulated forces will improve participants understanding. We investigate this hypothesis with a 2 (haptics: yes, no) 2 (visuals: yes, no) between subjects design user study, where all participants were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions. Participants were given a pre-test of buoyancy knowledge, then instructed to interact with the buoyancy simulation, then given a post-test of buoyancy knowledge. The present study is still in the process of data collection, with 40 out of 60 participants. Preliminary results highlight a significant improvement in performance of participants in the haptic-and-visual condition, while no significant differences were observed in other conditions.
Qi et al. (Sun,) studied this question.