Walking on the Bright Sight: Evaluating a Photovoltaics Virtual Reality Education Application

Virtual reality (VR) has demonstrated its potential in educational settings, allowing students to explore complex and otherwise inaccessible learning scenarios and material. We present a virtual reality learning application based on a real photovoltaics (PV)-array as an interdisciplinary work-in-progress approach towards an engaging VR-application with long-lasting learning effects. Students can inspect, alter and connect individual PV-modules and engage with the learning material in a game-based way. The application was developed by an interdisciplinary team in a participatory approach. To test, expand and improve the VR-application in future iterations, it was used in a course with students, who evaluated their experience via a pre-/post-online questionnaire and additional semi-structured individual interviews (N=7). The results show positive (self-reported) effects on different aspects covered in the evaluation (e.g. usability, learning motivation) regarding PV-arrays. Students recognized the benefit over traditional learning material and praised the strong resemblance of the VR-environment with the real counterpart.