A 3D Virtual Learning System for STEM Education

A recent boom has been seen in 3D virtual worlds for entertainment, and this in turn has led to a surge of interest in their educational applications. Although booming development has been seen, most of them only strengthen the traditional teaching methods using a new platform without changing the nature of how to teach and learn. Modern computer science technology should be applied in STEM education for the purpose of rising learning efficiency and interests. In this paper, we focus on the reasoning, design, and implementation of a 3D virtual learning system that merges STEM experiments into virtual laboratory and brings entertainment to knowledge learning. An advanced hand gesture interface was introduced to enable flexible manipulation on virtual objects with two hands. The recognition ability of single hand grasping-moving-rotating activity SH-GMR allows single hand to move and rotate a virtual object at the same time. We implemented several virtual experiments in the VR environment to demonstrate to the public that the proposed system is a powerful tool for STEM education. The benefits of this system are evaluated followed by two virtual experiments in STEM field.