VR Technical Drawing Learning Activity for College Engineering Students: Design, Development and Evaluation

Virtual Reality (VR) research has shown promising benefits in several educational areas, particularly those necessitating interaction with spatial information - a key element in teaching engineering skills such as technical drawing. This paper presents a broad process for designing and developing VR-based instructional activities, ultimately producing a VR application that employs immersive visualization and interaction. An evaluation of the application’s effectiveness revealed that engineering students using the VR application performed comparably to those using conventional methods, such as analog drawing, on course exercises. The study also explored cognitive load, comparing the VR group with a control group and a glass box animation group. While the glass box group showed an advantage over the VR group in cognitive load, no significant difference in aggregate scores between the VR and control groups was found. This is notable, given the increased interaction required by the VR exercise. These results provide initial evidence that traditional learning activities can be effectively translated into an immersive VR context and strengthen the case for VR as a viable medium for remote learning. However, it also points to the need for further research which improves the VR exercise and identifies the factors contributing to the management of cognitive load.