Virtual/Mixed Reality Control of a Game Through Scratch

Virtual Reality has been one of the interesting topics that have risen in the previous years. It has diverged into many fields including medicine, tourism, and education. On the other hand, new techniques have been used for teaching programming rather than the traditional paper and pen technique. The work presented in this paper proposes a new way of teaching children programming using the Virtual Reality (VR) technology. A game has been implemented with Scratch-like background to test whether the immersive factor of VR would have a positive effect on the learning outcome of the children. A study has been conducted on 10 participants to compare between two techniques for teaching the basic programming concepts: VR game and Desktop game. Results showed that the mean of the learning gain of the VR group was higher than the Desktop mean but with no significant p-value. However, the engagement test results showed that the participants were more engaged to the VR game than the Desktop game with p-value of 0.032.