A Piloting Study of Measuring Effectiveness of Virtual Reality in Understanding a New Concept in Educational Support Systems

In this paper, we report a piloting study before to confirm the effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) on education, especially grasping a new concept. Quantum programming is a new field of programming which is basically unknown to conventional programmers. Therefore, we select quantum programming as a topic in which we check the effectiveness of VR. We develop two education support systems on quantum programming, one with VR and the other without VR. Subjects use both systems and we compare the results. There are two limitaions of this study. One is that we cannot say the experiment condition is carefully controlled because the two systems are different at many parts, not only the part we want to test. The other is the number of subjects for the experiment is very small. So we need an additional study with improvement the limitations. Even with the liitations, the results as a pilot study show that VR can be effective in helping people grasp new concepts.