Enhancing Environmental Education with Virtual Reality

Project Overview

The project seeks to address a significant challenge in environmental science education, which is that decisions are often spatially and temporally distant from the environmental impacts of those decisions, making it difficult to grasp the tradeoffs and significance of certain pathways. In an interactive and immersive AR/VR environment, undergraduate students will connect quantitative models they use in class to environmental impacts, engineering actions, and policy interactions more tangibly. Essentially, the tool will act as a simple game in which students attempt to achieve a sustainable future. This proposal focuses on the initial development of the tool and aims at preparing it for the Fall 2024 academic semester in EEE 355 Environmental Engineering Sustainability. After successfully piloting the virtual simulation in the course, the team plans to make the experiential learning public for use at other institutions and secure external funding to create a suite of tools for environmental education.

Project Team

• Hua Cai, Associate Professor, Environmental and Ecological Engineering
• Kendrick Hardaway, PhD Graduate Student, Environmental and Ecological Engineering