TASK-ORIENTED VIRTUAL REALITY FOR THE TRAINING OF SITUATIONAL AWARENESS IN SECONDARY VOCATIONAL ENGINEERING EDUCATION
project background
Our society has an increasing need for vocationally trained engineers who are able to deal with variation, uncertainty and risks in their daily jobs. This requires them to be able to assess and understand job situations, and to anticipate how they might develop. Such knowledge is called situational awareness (SA). SA informs decision-making and actions to keep situations under control. It is assumed that SA develops after years of experience on the job. It is also assumed that such knowledge cannot be trained in schools. The current project aimed to bridge this gap between the formal learning at school and the experiential, on-the-job learning. It did so by using Virtual Reality (VR) technology to bring realistic working situations to the classroom, in which student can experience the full complexity of work situations and train their SA.
Funding and partners
The project is funded by the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO) under project number 40.5.18540.210. Partners in this project are researchers from Educational Science and Technology collaborate with researchers from Construction Management and Engineering, teachers from two Dutch vocational engineering schools (SOMA college; ROC van Twente), BAM, Bouwend Nederland, and the ASPARi network.
Involved researchers
