Let's share our learning! 23-25 March 2023 University College Dublin Workshop

In March this year Krys Bangert, Edward Browncross, Matteo Di Benedetti and Simon Hayes travelled to University College Dublin in Ireland to present a series of workshops on MEE’s teaching methods. This visit was a following on from a workshop that had been delivered by Andrew Garrard and Adam Funnel on similar topics in the previous year.

The workshop was run in two parts: a morning and afternoon session. Edward and Krys led the morning session that was on “Extended Reality for Teaching” and Simon and Matteo presented on “Project-based Learning” in the afternoon.

After finding the building, we then met up with their team and had a brief tour around their XR (eXtended Reality) facilities. Following this we were given the space to set up, Edward and I had brought a lot of VR (Virtual Reality) equipment with us in the form of 3 VR headsets and an external Graphics card enclosure. Thankfully the Eduroam wifi still worked and setup was straightforward.

After a brief introduction from Matteo about MEE, I kicked off proceedings with a 20 minute presentation on the “Current state of VR”, then we had 40 minutes of tech demos using the headsets. This consisted of showing the differences between PC VR applications and standalone VR with existing commercial packages (Steam & Meta’s own).  Then Edward took the lead delivering a group session on “Why should we care” about XR in a teaching context using the 1-2-4-All methodology. Each section of the group work discussed a questions that we posed to them: “If I use XR, my students learning will improve because?”, “What barriers do you foresee to adopting XR in your teaching?”. This ended with groups creating post-it note boards of their combined thoughts, which they presented to the rest of the groups at the end of the session.

We then gave another tech demo, this time showcasing the VR programs we had created in house currently being used for research and development purposes. This included the Pilot Plant training simulation using WondaVR, Open XR templates in unity, Augmented Reality (AR) hydraulic bench with CFD data and the 3 point bend machine simulation.

The final part of the workshop was showing participants how to make their own content using WondaVR (free trial), a Web XR Template made in house, using 360 cameras and a free photogrammetry android app. The idea was that people would capture 360 images or 3d photo scans then add them to the Unity Template or the WondaVR scenes then interact with them.

Simon spoke of his experience leading the aerospace curriculum with an emphasis on building different types of drones with increasing complexity throughout the different years of study. He brought many of the different drone concepts with him to show the attendees.

Matteo then gave a presentation on his work with teaching Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and a representative from UCDs School of Architecture also presented on their approach to project based learning design, that was much more holistic than that of their school of engineering.

All of the talks were well received and generated a lot of interesting discussions afterward. It also kicked off a potential collaboration between Simon and UCD making a simulation tool for modelling jet engine thermodynamics. We are hoping that the team from UCD will also come to the University of Sheffield to give some presentations/workshops on their methods too in the coming year.