Virtual Reality to Improve Students’ Understanding of the Extremes of Scale in STEM

This project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances fundamental research on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. This project will investigate how students’ understanding of scale and number sense (numeracy) can be improved in virtual reality (VR).

Research shows that students of all ages hold inaccurate ideas about the size of scientifically relevant entities. For instance, students have difficulty distinguishing the magnitude of difference between the sizes of molecules and cells, or between Earth’s moon and the sun. Because many STEM fields—from virology to astronomy—involve work conducted at extremes of scale, students must develop accurate conceptions of scales that exist well beyond their everyday experience of the world.

An inaccurate understanding of scale can obscure the applicability of numeric representation to the real world and become a barrier for entry to STEM. This project will create Scale Worlds, an immersive virtual environment, where students can see various scientific entities in relation to their own bodies and conduct realistic size comparisons that cannot be replicated in everyday experience.

Inside Scale Worlds, scientific entities—such as a blue whale and a water molecule—will be distributed among distinct environments, each of which corresponds to a different exponent in scientific notation. Students will be able to see their own bodies and increase or decrease in size relative to these entities, with numeric symbols in scientific and standard notation serving as the primary means of navigation.

Development of Scale Worlds will include the iterative design of 31 distinct environments with multimodal experiential cues that reinforce scale, analytical evaluation with usability experts in VR, and formative evaluation with non-expert students. A comparative study with middle school and undergraduate students will assign participants to a projection-based virtual environment (or “CAVE”), head-mounted VR display, or non-VR desktop simulation condition, with the desktop condition being the lowest level of immersion.

A subsequent study will observe students’ precise body movements along with corresponding verbalizations in two versions of Scale Worlds: one with the full feature set of structural elements and multimodal experiential cues, and the other with a reduced feature set. This will offer insight into the impact of these features on engagement. Project outcomes include: (a) two validated versions of a scaling environment that reinforces scientific and standard notation; (b) virtual reality usability guidelines; (c) recommendations for STEM educators on technology use; and (d) publicly accessible lesson plans for leveraging Scale Worlds for STEM learning and numeracy, which will be developed in partnership with practicing teachers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.