Abstract
Prof. Xiao Hu, Associate Professor, Mathematics, Science, and Technology, Faculty of Education, HKU
Mr. Zuo Wang, Student, Faculty of Education, HKU
Ms. Eugenia Lo, Teaching Assistant, Academic Unit of Language and Literacy Education, Faculty of Education, HKU
Theoretically underpinned by constructionism, maker activites empower students in creating personally meaningful and real-world physical or digital artefacts (e.g., woodwork, mobile app, etc.). The learning process of maker activities are often exploratory and experimental, where the learning outcomes mainly include the development of content knowledge and also 21st-century skills. Thanks to the democratization of digital technologies, virtual reality (VR) has gradually shifted from a user- to a creator-centered paradigm. In addition to the high-end forms of VR requiring programming expertise and expensive headsets, low-end VR contents have emerged, often composed of spherical panoramas and multimedia objects.
In this poster, we present a multi-year study on students’ AI- and analytics-supported learning process and outcomes arising from the maker activity of VR creation in the context of the Common Core course, CCCH9051 Digitizing Cultural Heritage in Greater China. Since the 2018 cohort, we have designed, implemented, evaluated, and refined our maker-based pedagogy, a learning outcome framework, as well as our self-developed VR creation tools. In particular, in recent years we have also introduced a learning analytics dashboard and GenAI tools (e.g., a customized chatbot, a text-to-image generator) to the maker activity and are assessing their effectiveness in learning through a series of classroom experiments. This poster summarizes and reflects on our iterative research-informed pedagogical designs, findings from analyzing multiple data sources (e.g., survey, system logs, artefacts), and their pedagogical implications.