Abstract
In STEM fields, the primary goal is not to teach students how to recite formulas but to support the students’ understanding of underlying principles and phenomena. Students of fields such as physics should be engaged with hands-on experiments and interactive visualizations. In this work, we discuss how modern e-learning tools can support hands-on learning experiences and present the interactive learning tool Maroon in this context. Maroon is a virtual educational laboratory, which is designed to support flexible and dynamic immersive learning experiences. It is developed with a game engine to support the deployment to different devices and setups. In this chapter, we discuss Maroon’s architecture and describe the different versions of Maroon with a focus on virtual reality experiences, their use cases, advantages, and disadvantages.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank MIT’s John W. Belcher for his valuable expertise in pedagogical simulation design.
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Pirker, J., Holly, M., Lesjak, I., Kopf, J., Gütl, C. (2019). MaroonVR—An Interactive and Immersive Virtual Reality Physics Laboratory. In: Díaz, P., Ioannou, A., Bhagat, K., Spector, J. (eds) Learning in a Digital World. Smart Computing and Intelligence. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8265-9_11
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