About & Acknowledgements

Improving Technician Skills in Advanced Manufacturing with a Low-Cost Virtual Reality Platform

National Science Foundation Award #2055722

Virtual reality applications have shown promise in providing effective training for technicians. The technology can replace the need for expensive hardware used in hands-on training. However, virtual reality applications are also expensive, creating a barrier to adoption by community and technical colleges. The potential impact of virtual reality on student learning in advanced manufacturing technician programs is noteworthy, given the wide variety of devices and information that technicians need to understand to perform their tasks. This project will develop, implement, and assess a low-cost platform for developing virtual reality modules that can be adopted and customized by community colleges, including those with limited resources. By removing the barrier to the widespread use of virtual reality in technician education, this project aims to improve student learning in technical education programs. The project intends to create a network of more than 30 community and technical colleges that will be capable of creating, collaborating on, and sharing effective and customizable low-cost virtual reality educational materials for advanced manufacturing technicians.

The Low-Cost Virtual Reality Platform project will deliver four virtual reality modules on Blueprint reading, Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, Basic work area safety, and Quality control. The developed process and modules will be beta tested for educational effectiveness with incumbent manufacturing technicians and student technicians. The project team will then train others to develop and implement their own, customized modules and provide an online library of all resulting virtual reality modules. As a result of this project, a pool of community and technical college educators will be trained to utilize the manufacturing tools developed. This project will promote the level of academic institutions in the United States and provide a unique professional development opportunity for community and technical college educators in science, technology, engineering, math, manufacturing, and career and technical, education. The resources and instructional materials produced will be open source via the project website so that they could be accessed and used by any academic institution or manufacturers.

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No.2055722.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.