VRBioreactor

posted on 13 Jun 2021 by jeannie

A customized VR learning experience for pharmaceutical engineering students to interact with bioreactors for cell culture before actual lab practicals. This is an example of deep immersification.

Brief

One of the main issues with a traditional chemical engineering curriculum is the lack of opportunities for immersive experiences with actual engineering plant equipment that are highly regulated. Therefore, the students learn the theory but have difficulty applying the concepts effectively in practice to be competent engineers.

The use of virtual reality (VR) to expose chemical engineering students to plant equipment in classroom learning is a viable solution. VR technology is becoming more accessible due to advancements in technology and the corresponding lowering of costs. Educators, however, find it hard to adopt VR in the classroom as they mainly face difficulties in developing or procuring relevant VR content for their curriculum.

To solve the above problems, this proof of concept project will involve the creation of VR content and pedagogical approaches of applying immersive virtual reality in a chemical engineering curriculum. This high impact project could potentially improve learning outcomes of engineering students due to better understanding of the link between concept and application. Significant outcomes of this research include a validation of the approach and subsequently VR design guidelines for the approach. These outcomes can be applied and applied across a variety of engineering curriculum that include a significant practical component.

Members

• Jeannie Lee (SIT)
• Bernard Loo (SIT)
• Chek Tien Tan (SIT)
• Adison Wong (SIT)
• Kok Hwa Lim (SIT)
• Simon Lui (SUTD)
• Songjia Shen (UTS)
• Benjamin Kwok (SIT)

Outputs

Chen, Q., Low, S. E., Yap, J. W. E., Sim, A. K. X., Tan, Y. Y., Kwok, B. W. J., Lee, J. S. A., Tan, C. T., Loh, W. P., Loo, B. L. W., Wong, A. C. K. (2020). Immersive virtual reality training of bioreactor operations. Proceedings of 2020 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering, TALE 2020, 873–878. https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE48869.2020.9368468

Chek Tien Tan, Jeannie Lee, Bernard Loo, Songjia Shen, Simon Lui. Exploring Gamification and VR to Improve Chemical Engineering Learning Outcomes. In Proc. Clute International Conference in Technology in Education (ICTE), pp. 369-1, 2018.

Acknowledgements

This work is funded by:

1. Tertiary Education Research Fund (TRF) grant from the Ministry of Education (MOE), Singapore.
2. SALT (SIT Advancement of Learning & Teaching) grant from the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT).