Work in Progress: Design and Development of an Immersive Virtual Reality Educational Game for Wind Power Education

In this paper, the research team will discuss the lessons learned from the design and creation of an Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) serious game intended to enhance the teaching of a Wind Turbine lab in an Introduction to Engineering class at a community college. The serious game was designed and written by four students at the community college as part of a summer research project under the leadership of two professors from two institutions: a community college, and a university. The students learned storyboarding, SketchUp, and Unity and applied these tools to create the serious game from scratch. In the serious game, future students will be able to engage in an immersive virtual reality environment, reinforce power equations discussed in class, and adjust the parameters of the wind turbines themselves to see the resulting power through a numeric display and the amount of light generated. The goal of this paper is to share the design choices and development of the IVR serious game for use in an Introduction to Engineering virtual classroom to enhance the teaching of wind energy conversion. Learned lessons will be shared to support other instructors that are planning on pursuing similar research and/or implementing innovative technology in their courses.