Effect of virtual reality technology on the teaching of urban railway vehicle engineering

Abstract

AbstractThe real key structures of urban railway vehicle are costly and dangerous, but students majoring in relevant fields have to acquire skills needed to operate the key structures to get good jobs or do academic research easily. The virtual reality (VR) technology, which has been used in many fields, can provide students with a unique learning experience. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of VR on the operational skills and cognitive load in students studying urban railway vehicle engineering. A virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) was designed to help students understand how a bogie is dismantled or assembled, thus enabling them to dismantle or assemble bogie. The experimental subjects were randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group, and each group contained 31 male and 9 female freshmen majoring in urban railway vehicle engineering. Corresponding pretests, teaching activities, and posttests were carried out according to the proposed teaching and experimental designs. The VRLE was used to teach the students in the experimental group, whereas the other group was taught by traditional teaching methods. The experimental results show that VR played a positive part in the students' acquisition of operational skills and the VRLE was helpful in reducing the cognitive load in the students when they were performing experiments. The results reveal that VR technology has a positive impact on the education in urban railway vehicle engineering.