Objective:

Increase awareness and understanding of the role of a site engineer among teenagers.

Deliverables:

A fully interactive VR experience that educates students about the role through immersive, gamified learning moments.

Users & Context:

Designed for teenage students, the experience runs for 10 minutes in a classroom setting, with up to 5 students using VR headsets at a time.

Approach:

• Design thinking and agile methodology.
• User-Centered Research – Conducted interviews with the course director and teachers, and spoke with students to understand the context, learning goals, lesson plan, motivations, and pain points of existing teaching approaches for this topic.
• Ideation - considered instructional design, pedagogy, gamification, as well as more general user experience and accessibility questions to evaluate the best way to use VR to achieve the learning goals.
• Journey Mapping & Lo-Fi Wireframing – Designed clear, intuitive flows for learners to find and complete different tasks and learning activities in a fun and gamified way.
• Close collaboration with the 3D studio team and the software developers to check the viability of the ideas and explain design decisions.
• Created a design library for this project.
• Built Hi-Fi Wires, Prototypes & Tested the solution with the teachers and students.
• Iterated based on the feedback from the dev team, as well as stakeholders and users.

Biggest Project Challenges :

• Limited experience time versus a large site—students sometimes got lost or struggled to reach tasks. We addressed this by adding teleporting and an in-game map to help students navigate more quickly.
• The site engineer role has many facets, so we worked with the course director and teachers to focus on the most essential activities.