Effect of virtual reality technology on the teaching of urban railway vehicle engineering

Abstract

The real key structures of urban railway vehicle are costly and dangerous, but students majoring in relevant fields have to acquire skills needed to operate the key structures to get good jobs or do academic research easily. The virtual reality (VR) technology, which has been used in many fields, can provide students with a unique learning experience. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of VR on the operational skills and cognitive load in students studying urban railway vehicle engineering. A virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) was designed to help students understand how a bogie is dismantled or assembled, thus enabling them to dismantle or assemble bogie. The experimental subjects were randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group, and each group contained 31 male and 9 female freshmen majoring in urban railway vehicle engineering. Corresponding pretests, teaching activities, and posttests were carried out according to the proposed teaching and experimental designs. The VRLE was used to teach the students in the experimental group, whereas the other group was taught by traditional teaching methods. The experimental results show that VR played a positive part in the students' acquisition of operational skills and the VRLE was helpful in reducing the cognitive load in the students when they were performing experiments. The results reveal that VR technology has a positive impact on the education in urban railway vehicle engineering.

Effect of virtual reality guidance system on the overhaul teaching

“…VR technology plays a positive part in the students' acquisition of operational skills. The virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) helped reduce the cognitive load in the students when they were performing experiments [38]. A Petri net (PN)‐based approach is proposed to support VR model behavior programming.…”

A virtual simulation experiment platform of subway emergency ventilation system and study on its teaching effect

“…The application of virtual reality technology in teaching is mainly to make participants vividly feel the scenes similar to reality, and bring a more positive impact to participants’ learning. This technology has gradually been studied in training, engineering education, science education, engineering laboratory, etc 11 – 14 . The virtual simulation platform can provide convenient interactive learning of 3D models by using remote laboratory, computer, and web-based simulation 15 , 16 .…”

“…The instructional designer can’t have a direct influence on the internal cognitive load, but the external cognitive load and related cognitive load are related to the instructional designer, and the three types of load are superimposed on each other 31 , 32 . Yang et al developed a virtual simulation teaching platform for urban rail transit and studied the influence of simulation teaching on students’ knowledge learning and cognitive load 11 . Researchers have found that using a virtual simulation platform to improve teaching design can help reduce students’ cognitive load and promote effective learning 11 , 17 , 33 .…”

“…Yang et al developed a virtual simulation teaching platform for urban rail transit and studied the influence of simulation teaching on students’ knowledge learning and cognitive load 11 . Researchers have found that using a virtual simulation platform to improve teaching design can help reduce students’ cognitive load and promote effective learning 11 , 17 , 33 . The traditional teaching method is difficult to ensure the participation of each student and the teaching quality of teachers, and the limitation of emergency experiment has a certain impact on students’ deep learning and understanding, so virtual simulation experiment is adopted to improve students’ learning effect and course satisfaction.…”

Distributed wind power virtual simulation experiment system for cultivating the ability to solve complex engineering problems

“…For large‐scale and complex engineering systems with high voltage and risk, practical courses are difficult to be conducted in traditional laboratories at universities, and students often do not have the opportunity to visit a real engineering project. Virtual simulation practical teaching has become a new kind of teaching mode with the development of virtual reality and computer technologies [6,13,16,19,24]. Virtual simulation technology provides clear visions and simulation analysis of experiments that cannot be carried out in traditional laboratories [3‐5,17,18,20,22].…”