Abstract
This work proposes a 3D Virtual World environment and a didactic experience for training young students in an environment capable of supporting the engineering practices based on technical drawing. The main difficulty of technical drawing consists in representing a 3D object on a 2D medium. This restriction imposes to human mind to be able to summarize the spatial properties of objects on the paper. The proposed system trains these capabilities by requiring students to build, in the simulated environment, simple objects represented with 2D drawings. In this way, the students are not only pushed to move themselves between different dimensionality spaces, but also they benefit of the 3D spaces for moving and exploring the models they are building. An empirical evaluation, conducted as a controlled experiment, has provided enthusiastic results in terms of user performances and impressions.
Highlights
In this work we experiment a Second Life environment, VirtualHOP (Virtual Help for Orthogonal Projections), programmed as a specific setting for teaching technical drawing to first level students
We collected the opinions of 14 young students, from 11 to 13 years old after involving them in the didactic experience described in previous section
In this paper we presented and evaluated the didactic support provided by VirtualHOP, a Second Life (SL) environment programmed for helping young students in technical drawing
Summary
In this work we experiment a Second Life environment, VirtualHOP (Virtual Help for Orthogonal Projections), programmed as a specific setting for teaching technical drawing to first level students. Our aim is to exploit the three dimensions of Second Life environments to improve the understanding of orthogonal projection drawing and of the relationships between the real 3D objects and their 2D representations. The proposed Second Life (SL) environment is composed by a display that shows to students the orthogonal view of the object to build, a specific didactic module that demonstrates the resulting virtual 3D representation of the object, and a construction area where the students can exercise their building capabilities aiming at reproducing the proposed object. The student selects the drawing he/her wants to work on and displays its orthogonal views 2. The system displays a 3D version of the selected object the student can examine and explore from various sides, moving in the environment
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