Interactive virtual reality games to teaching circuit analysis with metacognitive and problem-solving strategies

There is an increasing awareness among engineering faculty that engineering students lack effective metacognitive and problem-solving strategies, which poses significant barriers to their learning. The research basis of this work is that providing students with explicit strategy instructions improves their comprehension and learning. This paper presents such a work that develops a virtual reality theme-based game system where circuit analysis is the theme and engineers solving real-life problems are the scenes. Deploying the games as a replacement for the traditional laboratory setting of the four target courses, this approach immerses students in actual engineering design challenges where a selection of metacognitive and problem-solving strategies is unfolded. With no additional software and hardware required, the game system can be installed, configured, and run in any personal computer, making this development cost effective and easily transportable.