The Glasgow School of Art

Immersive Engineering Education

Primary Supervisor: Dr Daniel Livingstone
Co-Supervisor: Dr Sandy Louchart

Everything you learn in abstract in traditional engineering education describes very real interactions between tangible systems in the real world. However, at the point arguably most crucial to cultivating further passion and interest in the industry, learners are to this day taught with lines, rectangles, and abstracted frames of reference. These are fantastic tools for a familiar engineer, but a hard shell to break through when grasping concepts for the first time.

Understandably demonstrating everything in reality has cost, safety, access and scoping considerations that easily justify much of this approach in the past, but does the emergence of immersive systems enable a newly accessible broader contextualised scope for teaching engineering fundamentals in context? Can Virtual Reality help develop crucial spatial cognition skills that are significant indicators of success in STEM education and careers? Following appropriate Serious Games design principles, can a more dynamic STEM curriculum be made by capitalising on the strengths of these technologies?