Mixed Reality in Practical Lab Courses
Practical lab courses allow students to interact with complex processes, but the underlying reactions are often not understood due to the inability to cognitively perceive them. Experimenting in Mixed Reality allows students to see the unseeable, ultimately helping them to build intuition. We aim to improve learning outcomes by merging theory with real-world practice using a novel, modular MR app.
The project
Microfluidics is a highly interdisciplinary topic that combines principles of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering, and provides both theoretical and practical learning opportunities from device fabrication techniques, fluid dynamic analysis at the micro-scale, to circuit design for biomedical applications. Microfluids can be hard to understand by students due to its inherent complexity and the inability to cognitively perceive the chemical and physical processes involved. This can create a disconnect between student understanding of the experiment and the underlying fundamentals.
To address this issue, we created a mixed reality (MR) lab course experience to teach ETH students how to build a microfluidic device. We developed a modular application, called ALETHA, for the Microsoft HoloLens to transform the traditional paper protocol into an experience that is immersive, interactive, and promotes independent learning. We hypothesized that MR will enhance student understanding of microfluidic device fabrication techniques and overall help them build intuition on the chemical, physical, and engineering processes involved. The development of this new MR teaching platform employs design principles from the learning science field such as control of experimental variables, multimodal representations, gamification, and instructional scaffolding.
Implementation into teaching practice
We partnered with the external software company afca and created the application ALETHA for the HoloLens that allows for modular and flexible design of MR lab courses. ALETHA can easily be adapted to other lab courses taught at ETH thanks to its user-friendly web portal. We used ALETHA to design a practical lab course to teach students how to build a microfluidic device. Twelve ETH master students used ALETHA and successfully completed the course To test whether MR enhances learning, we compared 12 students that followed the course with ALETHA to 12 students that followed the course using a paper protocol format. We assess student learning and affective outcomes using knowledge quizzes to test their understanding as well as surveys to evaluate their overall motivation and engagement. Overall, we observed greater intuition building and engagement from MR students compared to the control group. While a larger cohort size may be needed to effectively assess the influence of MR on student learning in this context, ALETHA nevertheless provides a practical example of how MR can successfully be implemented to teach complex interdisciplinary topics such as microfluidics.
Lessons learned and further impacts
Overall, ALETHA was received positively by students. Soon after wearing the HoloLens, students were seen completely immersed into the experience and started working independently, with little assistance from the instructors. To measure student learning outcomes, we designed and distributed pre/post and 1-week post-lab surveys and knowledge quizzes. The survey consisted of 37 likert scale questions chosen from validated psychometric scales to test for motivation, engagement, and fulfilment. The knowledge quizzes consisted of 26 questions and evaluated knowledge, understanding, analytical-thinking, problem-solving, and creativity in four key areas of the lab course (general concepts, microfluidic device building and troubleshooting, plasma machine, micro-scale fluidic behavior). Immediately after the course (post-lab), MR and control students overall scored, respectively, 19% and 16% higher compared to their pre-lab performance, with the largest increase being for intuition building (IB) questions (26%) in the MR group. Students from both groups also scored significantly higher for information recall questions.