Using Immersive Virtual Reality to Explore the Learning Performance and Cognitive Load of Students in STEAM Electronic Circuits Learning

In the recent era applying advanced emerging technologies to educational issues has become a subject for wide discussion, also students have a high scope to obtain much more learning experience and resources through these exclusive technologies. Many such studies have used this immersive virtual reality to explore the feasibility of STEAM education for their students. However, learning activities through immersive virtual reality may have some negative effects as well, indeed which may indirectly reduce student learning performance. Therefore, this study has built an extremely realistic virtual reality system to present the materials of electronic circuits. The students can make use of immersive virtual reality devices and handheld sensing devices to operate and practice the electronic circuit learning tasks in a virtual learning environment. In addition, this study has recruited 20 students to have an investigation on the effect of immersive virtual reality on learning performance and cognitive load in electronic circuit learning. According to this result, the experimental group using the virtual reality system for STEAM learning activities can significantly have an emerging improvement in the learning performance. Additionally, the cognitive load of the experimental group was also lower than that of the control group in the process of STEAM learning activities.